Today is the last day of the Church year: Saturday of the 34^th Week in Ordinary Time. After six months of green, liturgists are breaking out the purple and pink.  At sundown tonight, it’s Advent.

Advent is a time of preparation, as John the Baptist cries: Prepare ye the way of the Lord!  Step outside church, however, and it’s already secular Christmas: Prepare ye the cards and the gifts! Prepare ye the tree and the lights! Prepare ye the cookies and pies!

Even as I rail against it, I have to acknowledge that I enjoy many of the trappings of secular Christmas, because I’m pretty good at cards, gifts, trees, lights, cookies and pies. (Well maybe not so much with the pies.) Do I have to stop enjoying all these things in order to “do” Advent properly?

Of course not.

But I do have to think about the how and the why of the things I undertake in the next few weeks. Am I doing them compulsively, from a sense of ought? Or am I doing them lovingly, in a spirit of hospitality?

One thing the Advent and Christmas seasons have in common is that they are all about hospitality. We prepare to welcome Christ into our hearts as we prepare to welcome people into our homes. The sweet spot is when we can do both: welcome people into our hearts as well as our homes. That is the essence of hospitality.

When I was in the volunteer community at Freedom House in Richmond some thirty years ago, we used Henri Nouwen’s definition of hospitality to explain what we were trying to do for people experiencing homelessness. Hospitality, Nouwen suggested, is the creation of a free space where the stranger can enter and become a friend instead of an enemy.

Hospitality is the creation of a free space where the stranger can enter and become a friend instead of an enemy.

I have been thinking a lot about hospitality lately. Who or what requires free space to enter my heart this year? Who or what feels like a “stranger” to me, needing to be befriended?

I have an inkling about some of the answers to these questions, but I want to sit with them a while, pondering them in my rocking chair through the dark mornings of Advent. One thing I do know is that it has to do with change.

Everywhere I go these days, I seem to find myself in conversations about letting go. Letting go of cherished people and places. Letting go of faith communities that no longer feel like family. Letting go of agility and ability through illness and aging. Letting go of titles and roles that once defined identity. 

In all these scenarios, it’s easier to see what’s going than what’s coming. Tempting to cling to what was with nostalgia, and to regard what will be with suspicion.

What would it look like to be hospitable instead? To create a free space in our hearts where a strange and even frightening new aspect of life could enter and become a friend? To allow room for a new relationship or reality to grow within us—intentionally, gradually, peaceably?

In St. Vincent’s choir, my new favorite Christmas song is Friends in Christ, Rejoice. The refrain is simple but powerful: Like no god we had imagined is the baby in the straw. And that’s the point, really. As Christians we believe that God chose to enter our world in a way no one had imagined: the most vulnerable way possible. And it is still into the vulnerable parts of our lives—and our world—that this God is born, again and again.

Like no god we had imagined is the baby in the straw.

And so my prayer for you, this Advent season, is this:

May you create the space you need to be hospitable to yourself.
May you to take time to pause, to ponder, to pray, to notice.
May your hospitality overflow in gracious welcome
  to whoever and whatever will be part of your life in the year to come.
May the God of surprises come to you like no God you had imagined.
And may your far-from-ordinary days be extraordinarily blessed.

Christine