Poetic Reflections on Advent and the Wilson Chapel Project

We find ourselves once again in Advent,
a season that sits “between the times.”
But which times?

Advent. Even while the clergy remind us
that the church marks this
as the beginning of a new year,
a season of waiting, and watching,
and, above all, wondering.
But mostly we feel it
as a time of hurry
and rush between other times:
the press of trying to finish
things left undone – end of year
financial reckonings; appointments
and deadlines in the calendar’s last days;
shopping for gifts against the madness
of stores and malls and the dangerous impatience
of holiday shoppers; pausing to thank
those whose life and work sustains our own;
and, yes, on Sundays, worshiping the God
who still waits for us despite our hurry
and impatience and self-importance.

I catch glimpses of this routine drama
watching the new chapel
take shape and form
from my office window
day by day, the grinding of machines
and the flurry of men working
with tools and determination
who take the abstract lines and
measurements of an architect’s design
and give them solid definition
in steel and stone and glass, creating
an empty space where we
will come to worship
and wait for this Word to be born
again and again. Each morning,
long before most of us academics
make our daily appearances, the trucks
growl and groan as they crawl up the hill
under the burden of heavy cargo,
and hard-hatted men with steaming coffee cups
in hand begin to maneuver lifts – assembling
windows, finishing the slate roof, racing
against time to close this large empty cavern
against the coming cold of winter.

Advent, this season of wild hope
when we pray for God’s adventurous word
to come into being as life among us.
Advent, a season when faith comes
to us not as assertion but as question,
asking that we look in unlikely places –
in the shadows of our world, and
even in the darkness of our own lives –
and pray for the coming of this Word
in the places of our lives marred
by disappointment and death.
What will we, who know too well
the strength of darkness, believe
about the coming of this light
in the ordinary press and hurry of our lives?
What word of life will be born among us
this season and, yes, here in this place?

Dr. Mark S. Burrows, Professor of the History of Christianity, from the opening meditation for the December 2006 ANTS Board of Trustees’ meeting.