Advent Things

Walking to church all bleary eyed from my bustraveganza this week, I passed a bunch of stores having holiday sales, and I was feeling pretty cynical. I know that it is cliched to be bummed out by the commercialism of holiday time, but it was happening anyway. Usually I'm too excited about all the white lights and tradition to get bogged down. 

Back around behind Macy's there was a holiday display of some old timey white carolers in Dickens bonnets with little o-shaped mouths and hymn books and sitting in the display taking the kind of rest that isn't entirely willful was a very tired woman. 

On Broad street, some people were hauling faux-pine garlands out of the back of a truck to put up on the union league building, and that didn't feel great, either, for some reason. 

About halfway through the second song at church, the brand new lights went out, and we were all in not uncomfortably cold darkness singing and hearing about loving our enemies. People told about how they did it and how they couldn't do it, and everyone was humbled by the roughest of Christian mandates. We were encouraged to light a candle and say a prayer for an enemy, or if we couldn't bring ourselves to do it, to ask someone else to pray for them. 

There was something about all the enemy candles glowing in the semidarkness that brought my advent feeling round.