a w a k e : t o : d r e a m

Here’s my soapbox issue of the day:

Can we PLEASE, please get rid of the phrase, “the war on…” no matter what conflict it refers to? Can we just say, “the challenge to…” or “the disagreement about”? Can we please, please stop turning every hot-button issue into a slogan-machine so that more people can stick a bumper sticker on their car (or for that matter, around their wrist) and so that the backers of the issue can politicize it ever more?

The reason I rant about this is the recent release of a book, The War On Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday is Worse Than You Thought by John Gibson of FoxNews. First of all, how does Christmas have anything to do with making America hate liberals, I ask you?? Where is there room for polarized sabre-rattling like that at Christmastime? I agree that sometimes the PC machine goes too far and people try far too hard to “not offend” anybody by saying Christmas (gasp) when not everyone is a Christian, but come on.

“Advent,” as I was admonished this weekend on the radio, “is a season of waiting.” I happened to catch a piece of the news on Sunday morning - the morning after the deadline passed to release the four workers from Christian Peacemaker Teams held hostage in Iraq - which included an interview with the director of CPT in Canada, talking about how the parents of the Canadian hostages from CPT were doing. He said (approximately), “About the only thing keeping them going right now is their faith. They’re aware of the irony - Advent is a season of waiting, awaiting the birth of Christ, and for them, awaiting news…”

There is perhaps nothing we modern people need more than to be genuinely shaken up. Where life is firm we need to sense its firmness; and where it is unstable and uncertain and has no basis, no foundation, we need to know this too and endure it. We need to recognize that we have stood on this earth in false pathos, in false security, in spiritual insanity.

For this is the message of Advent: faced with him who is the Last, the world will begin to shake. Only when we do not cling to false securities will our eyes be able to see this Last One and get to the bottom of things. Only then will we be able to guard our life from the frights and terrors into which God the Lord has let the world sink to teach us, so that we may awaken from sleep, as Paul says, and see that it is time to repent, time to change things.

From “Watch for the Light: Readings for Advent and Christmas”