Advent is a season especially attuned to the Darkness, and it’s rhythms—not primarily the light. For the Darkness has a strange luminosity all its own, but our eyes must readjust.
At the beginning of November, I dizzied myself in a dervish with 7500 participants at the Parliament of World Religions. In a series of keynote presentations spanning Peace & Reconciliation, Climate, Women, Indigenous Voices, and the Next Generation, one unifying message was consistently offered, “Humans have caused this.” Whatever the challenge before us, it is our species who has created the conditions for our current reality.
The familiar stories of Jesus’ miraculous birth entered the Christian tradition in two different forms, separated by perhaps a decade. The original narrative was written by a man we …