“The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. The most you can do is live inside that hope, running down its hallways, touching the walls on both sides.”
~ Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

These are the days we in the Christian household say are filled with hope. We hope for the celebration that is the coming of the Christ Child, that new birth meant to budge us all off center in the ways of living our normal lives. We hope for peace….in our workplaces, in our families, in our friendships, on the whole of earth. We hope for it, we sing about it, we long for it in some place deeper than deep within us. Some of us hope for stillness, silence, quiet to collect the fragments of our living that seems flying about,just outside our reach. Others hope for excitement or at least a turn from the mundane, dullness of struggle and loneliness of the predicaments that never seem to get fixed.

Hope. It is big and if we forget that it is a powerful force in our lives we can slip down the slope of despair pretty quickly. The knowledge of this has been popping up for me all over the place in the last days. It seems people’s lives, those I know and those I only read or hear about in the wider world, are carrying heavy burdens. Illness. Death. Grief. Loss. Homelessness. Hunger. Poverty. Unemployment or under-employment. The needs seem, at least to me, greater than usual. Have you felt this, too?

Two Sundays ago at church someone said to me:”People are certainly carrying bowls full of tears.” Bowls full of tears. What an image! What a metaphor! As the days and weeks have unfolded, I have seen it more and more. I have wondered if this year is different. Or is it my age that has me seeing and experiencing this in a more profound way? Perhaps. Or are there simply more tears flowing at this particular moment in time?

Yesterday I sat allowing my cold, dry and cracked hands to warm as they hugged a coffee cup. I stared out into the middle distance thinking about the image of people walking down streets, through buildings, in and out of doors, their hands outstretched holding their bowls. Full. It was a prayer of sorts. And then it hit me that in many ways this being awake and aware of these hands, these tears, is actually another gift of Advent. If we truly practice ‘staying awake’ as the scriptures urge us to do, our experience is not just of the ‘Wow!’ moments. Like the amazing, full and brilliant Snow Moon of last night. Or the ways in which people are humming gently under their breath as they move from place to place creating live Muzak all around. Or the smiles that are offered in more demonstrative ways as doors are held open or cookies are passed.

No, being awake, truly awake to the fullness of this wide Creation, to the vast array of humanity, also means seeing the vulnerabilities and the deep hurts we all carry. All the time. Every day. Each season. Sometimes, particularly these days that lead toward a time designed, or at least sold to us to be warm and magical, are meant to be full of more hope than any time any life can produce.

The gift of living, the gift of Advent is to be awake to it all, tinsel and tears, hope and hopelessness, in all its fullness. The Christ Child was born into the harshest of places and continues to be born again and again. In sanctuaries and on street corners. At tables laden with food and those with the staples acquired at the food shelf. In hospital rooms and humble homes.

Perhaps our real work is living inside the hope, holding our own bowl of tears and reaching out to all the others who walk beside us as we wait patiently and urgently for this birth to come again.