It's that season again! My favorite time of the year; when advertisers convince us with ever louder and more important-sounding soundbites to spend, spend, spend like the future of our children depends on it; when consumerism runs amok. It's the time of the year for light displays and blaring Christmas music. It's the time of the year for busy malls, busier malls and malls so insanely busy no sane person would ever enter. All in the name of the holidays.
Give me a break.
No, seriously, I need a break. I am desperate for reprieve--a retreat from all that is hectic.
Recently, I've been going up to Winnipeg every Tuesday night to play in a chess tournament. Six Tuesday nights... three hours driving in all. Well worth it. At first I thought I was heading up because I missed the competition. There is some truth in that; I do like challenging myself; but lately I've realized it's more complicated than that. There is something about playing chess--and even the drive--that has centered me during a time in the year when everything else is moving far too fast. I realized, finally, that it's the silence.
There may be no state of being so consistently undervalued as silence. I used to think that there were people who enjoyed moving slow, for whom silence was a virtue, and people who had to be doing things, and I was the latter. However, I now realize that there are people who are able to contemplate in the stillness, and people, like myself, who have to find more innovative ways to exist in silence but who need it just the same. In fact, those of us who are, by our nature, moving from thing to thing as fast as humanly possible seem to need it more.
I never realized before why chess has been so important to me. It's meditative. Now, don't get me wrong, it's not like I'm purging my mind of thoughts while playing chess. Rather, I am concentrating fully on one thing and embracing the silence around me. It's prayer of a rather primitive sort and it satisfies a need. A chess tournament hall is silent. There is a reason that cell phones ringing carry a near death sentence to the serious chess player; silence is a virtue and causing noise is sin.
We have few of these chess tournament halls in our daily lives. Most of what we do is consumed with noise. Today, my office has been more or less obliterated as some dedicated workers put in new windows. I appreciate what they are doing--they are, after all, providing me with a tremendous service--but it means I am stuck out in the open in the midst of chaos and constant, punctuated noise. It's no place to work, and I dare say that if this were the only situation in which I ever worked my stress level would never recede. I miss silence.
My phone rings. Workers talk with me. A face pops in my office. The printers whir. Bang. Bang. Bang.
Advent is rough. It's rough because it is so countercultural. It's rough because it's not very convenient to our busy lives. It's rough because we think we know what to expect so how can we live in a time of waiting?
It's easier to skip it. It's easier to live out loud. That's the credo of my generation. Avoid silence at all costs. Silence is awkward. Sitting should be combined with television or video games. Silence is the enemy.
And so it goes. The stress levels rise. We find ourselves unable to contemplate, unable to relieve the immense burdens in our lives, and we begin to think that the world is going down the tubes. We enter negative feedback cycles. Soon the world out there is evil and out to get us. We are trapped by our own devices. There's never enough stuff or time or noise. The noise just gets louder even as it makes less and less sense.
But...
Maybe Advent isn't really so rough. Maybe it's that we never knew what Advent was in the first place. We gave up silence for noise, fellowship for goods, peace for the next big thing, and along the way we lost everything that made this season good and true. This is the season of quiet and stillness. It is the season to rest in wait. It is the season to turn off the computer and the television, extinguish the bright lights and leave the store-fronts behind. It's the time to sit still and watch the stars.
That's what the shepherds did.
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