It's coming...Advent is almost here!

A couple weeks ago in church I found out a little something I didn't know about Advent. Advent is actually a time of the year for preparation and fasting. I bet most of you are just as surprised as I was when I found this out. How can advent be a time for fasting when we have fun music, great ammounts of cookies and desserts, lights, candles, and all the other wonderful things? It is now more certain than ever that our pre-Christmas celebrations look like and emphasize nothing like the church seasons ought to.

That brings us to the reason for this post: I think that I want to participate in a fast during this season of advent in order to help focus myself on the true nature of the season but I'm not sure. I think part of me being not sure is that I haven't had time to gear up for viewing the season this way. I have come to love the Great Fast (Lent) and I look forward to it all year so I'm not ignorant of the Christian practice of seasonal fasting but for some reason I'm having trouble parting with my regular advent ways.

Maybe it's because so much more is made of Christmas season in our society. Maybe it's because I haven't had time to ponder it or maybe it's another reason. Either way I'm still thinking hard about what to fast for Advent. This decision is both the joy and the curse of being a traditionally low-church protestant. The joy is that I can set my own boundries for the fast so that it is meaningful and allows me to take incremental steps toward greater sacrafices and the curse is that I have to make this deicision. Inhereting this low-church ecclesiology puts me at the center of the fast rather than us. It also causes me to find the delicate balance between being too strict in my fast and being too lenient. So this is the dilema. Do I set out on a path from which I cannot return and begin to place advent in a more historically celebrated context or do I allow my celebration of advent to be merely reflected in the knowledge of what it is about without allowing my body to partake in that knowledge. If I do fast what do I fast from?

On a side note I am really inspired by the Orthodox approach to this. Their fasting period is longer than our advent and it actually started a week or two ago. During this fast they fast from all meats and a few other things. I find this inspiring in that they fast from all meat during a time that overlaps with Thanksgiving. Talk about a challenge. It seems to me that the real challenge isn't so much the fasting, but rather the implicit message that fasting through a national and often familial holiday sends. The message is simply that the primary community unit is the church and that the true holidays are those that focus our hearts and minds on Christ our God.

This implicit message is truly the message that the gospel calls us all to embrace for our lives. Our allegiance is to God and his kingdom alone. While we may not need to forsake thanksgiving to show this; the mere fact that the members of this tradition align themselves with the historic church calendar and its fasts rather than the national, social, and familial one peaks loudly that the God is the object of obedience.

Please don't misunderstand me I am not calling all to an advent fast or even a lenten one. Although i think these seasonal disciplines are important I do not believe they are mandatory for all. Yes they are helpful insofar as we allow them to reveal to us the mysteries of the Godhead revealed through the church, and her year of services.