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I am thinking of an hourglass. When it is first turned over, the top half is heavy with sand. It seems like it will take forever for the sand to run through the narrowness at the middle.
If you were to cast your gaze on the narrowest point of the hourglass, by virtue of visual focus, you might come to think that time has slowed down. How long could it possibly take for each single tiny grain of sand to take its own turn slipping through that passage? It could seem, at times, to take an eternity.
It is revealing to notice in what ways we are patient or impatient toward that which seems to be eternity, or like eternity, in one way or the other. Advent invites us to focus our attention, to linger in time, to look around and wonder what the rush is all about.
Of course, by the clock, an hour is still an hour. A minute is still a minute. It is still December. The days are still leading, one by one, to Christmas. And during Advent, if we choose to practice a certain kind of attention, we may find one minute to be so much more than one minute. We may find one hour to be so much richer than one hour. We may discover the invitation to exist differently within the time given us.
Advent is an invitation to linger in time, ourselves, in a way that doesn’t make for hurry–in a way that brings attention to details we might otherwise pass over, mistaking the getting to the end for reaching the goal. These four Sundays of preparing can’t happen in a rush. In that way, Advent can be a window into eternity. It is, as grace would have it, God’s patience toward us and all creation that has the kind of time—the kind of infinite patience—it takes to bring about the wonder of our redemption.
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