Decidedly, Advent is one of my favorite times of year. It holds the mystery of "Christ is coming again" with the certainty of "Christ has come." It has a conspiratorial feel to it, as people think about living differently and the whispers of a different world. I love Advent.
It also comes with a cart-load of cultural baggage. If you read my last post, "What shall we call this spade," you know that I believe that the dominant picture of Christmastime as a consumeristic binge is idolatrous, if not blasphemous. But how to live differently? As I was lifting weights this evening, it occured to me... I need to ban the word "we" from my vocabulary until Christmas Day.
There is a part of me that loves to speak and write for its own sake. It loves to have people's attention and craves to hear the phrase "that's a great point." The word "we" includes you in on my "great point." It makes our struggle a collective one.
It also abdicates responsibility. I can say "we" and mean "you" or "them." We does not always include me. I can talk about "our struggle" and how "we" need to live differently this season, all the while making no plan or no effort to do it in my own life.
And so this season, I think I'm going to try to stop using the word "we" unless I actually mean "we." In a season all about what people should do for me (they should have one of those big-screens for ME, they should work with MY schedule), what if I instead took a stance where I will take responsibility for my actions and put my word to a different kind of Advent season?
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