Contemplating Advent

By Jeff Campbell

So many of us have this sense that this is not what Christmas was meant to be.  We juggle sacred and secular expectations, struggle with family and disappointments, with full schedules that can't quite overcome our doubts and  loneliness.

Contemplating Advent offers a road map toward aligning our lived experience with the things our hearts promise us about this season.  Comitting a few minutes each day to meditation, contemplation, and prayer can transform us from within.  

There are over 30 different spiritual practices in these pages.  They are arranged on traditional advent themes like joy, hope, and peace, and taken together they will not only lead to new possibilities for your experience of the holidays, they can also be the foundation for a new way of being in the world, the first steps in a daily practice which will carry you into the New Year and beyond.  Science and traditional spiritual wisdom agree that a daily meditative practice can change so much.  I hope you'll join us.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jeff Campbell
• Release date: Oct 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215715604

Book preview

Contemplating Advent:

Transform Your Christmas Season Through Spiritual Practice

By

Jeff Campbell

A Faith-ing Project Publication

Introduction

Week 1: Hope

Examen I

Day 1-1: Sacred Reading Practice

Day 1-2: A Breath Prayer

Day 1-3  Self Care & Connection

Day 1-4 Mindfulness-

Day 1-5 Meditative practice- Buddhist style, just noticing thoughts

Day 1-6 Reflection & retry of favorite practice

Day 1-7: Sacred reading practice on hope—

Chapter 2: Peace

Examen II

Day 2-1

Day 2-2 breath prayer-  Around making room in our hearts for the peace

Day 2-3 Self Care & Connection on Peace

Day 2-4: A Mindfulness Body Scan

Day 2-5 Meditative Practice- praying for enemies

Day 2-6 Reflection & retry of favorite

Day 2-7 Holy Reading: applying senses to a scene.

Chapter 3: Love

Day 3-1: Sacred reading

Day 3-2: breath prayer

Day 3-3: Self Care & Connection

Day 3-4 Mindfulness-

Day 3-5 Meditative Practice- in God’s womb

Day 3-6 Reflection and retry

Day 3-7 Sacred Reading

Chapter 4: Joy

Examen 4

4-1 Sacred Reading

4-2 Breath Prayer

4-3 Self Care & Connection

4-4 Mindfulness mindful eating

4-5 Meditative practice

4-6 Reflection and retry

4-7 Sacred reading—creating a new person for the scene

Afterword

Exclusive Previews of 2 books by Jeff Campbell

Introduction to ‘Building Your Spiritual Practice’

The First Why

Practice #1: Simply Breathing

Some final introductory thoughts of ‘Why.’

Introduction to ‘Discovering the Essence: How to Build a Spiritual Practice When Your Religion is Cracking Apart’

Introduction

The standard opening for a spiritually oriented book about Advent or Christmas seems to be a rather pious and holier-than-thou stance listing everything the world has gotten wrong with our holiday.

I think I’d like to begin by heading in the opposite direction and open with the things that modern Western society has gotten right about advent.  One of the characteristics that has managed to successfully jump the sacred-secular divide is the eager anticipation.  Families do their decorating.  Kids can’t sleep.  People maintain their traditions and build new ones.  Songs tell us that it is ‘the most wonderful time of the year.’

And it is this eager anticipation which is said to be the heart of the Advent season. Traditionally, the anticipation has two different aspects.  The first thing we are anticipating is the anniversary of the date Jesus is said to have been born on.  A strange kind of anticipation, perhaps, in that we are looking forward to the opportunity to look backward.  We are awaiting the date we celebrate Jesus’ birth.  At second look, it’s perhaps not such a weird thing.  We might count down the days until our own birthday, or an anniversary.  These are also cases of waiting for the ‘right’ date to look back. 

Of course, Joseph and Mary did not follow a modern calendar.  And much has been made of the fact that there aren’t many good reasons to assume that December 25th was in fact the day Jesus was born.  By now, most of us know that this date was chosen because of its closeness to The Winter Solstice.

For those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, there is brilliance at work in the choice of this date, regardless of the historical accuracy.  The days have been getting dark and cold.  If you, like me, live far from the equator, we find daylight to be such a fleeting experience: we wake in darkness.  At the end of our work day, we might drive home in darkness on those short days.  This darkness can seem deeply symbolic.  Celebrating the coming of God among us now, when God seems so far away, can be such a healing process.  Perhaps there is no time of the year when a reminder that God dwelled among us is needed more.

But this looking backward is only one side of the equation.  In Advent, we eagerly anticipate more than God’s past entry into the world.  We look forward to God’s return.  There are dozens of ways of thinking about what it means to hope for Jesus’ second coming.  I hope you’ll forgive me if I  just observe this in passing without trying to express just what Jesus' return will look like.  Regardless of the details, during Advent, we also look to Jesus’ second coming, whatever it is that this means to us.

Differences of opinion about the meaning of this expectation are the tip of the iceberg, when it comes to the ways that different traditions celebrate advent.  There are different views around when  advent begins and ends.  There are different ways of carving the weeks up; different themes, different orders.  There are different colors, different verses read, different liturgies and practices.

If we can’t see our way past these  little differences we have surely lost sight of the goal.  If this Jesus coming into the world is to truly begin with peace, with bringing us all together, we can’t get hung up here, on these details, before we even begin.

In arranging this book I have done my best to choose a middle, eclectic path.  It will hopefully not leave anyone fully ignored.  Anyone already within a tradition will be given lots of opportunities to stretch, a little bit, and adapt to the conventions I have landed on here.  Anyone without an advent tradition will be introduced to the basics, but should be aware that I have taken some liberties. 

This book features 28 full descriptions for 28 days of advent.  Each of these 4 weeks will be given a theme.  These weeks are hope, peace, love, and joy.  Within each week, there will be some routine.  Each will begin with a reflection on the theme as it relates to Christmas.  These reflections will include an invitation to try out a spiritual practice called the examen.  The Examen is a way of reflecting on the events of the previous day.  This examen practice can be engaged in throughout the week.  I encourage you to commit to doing your spiritual practice for a certain duration each day.  The Examen can be a nice back up practice when the day’s new practice is difficult to do for the full duration that you’d set aside. 

After each of those introductions, the week will be broken down into 7 days.  These weeks will be book ended with sacred reading practices.  In other words days 1 and 7 of each  week will offer an invitation to read scripture in new ways.  In each of these practices, I will suggest a specific passage that relates to the theme of the week and the overarching ideas of God entering the world.  Because sacred reading practices are, in my opinion, one of the more difficult types of practice to replicate based only on a description, after each day’s sacred reading practice I will share my experiences of what it was like to try this practice.  My hope is that this example of what the practice was like for me will help to make the exercise easier to conceptualize.

Days 2 of each week will be given to a breath prayer.  Day 3 will be a specific suggestion around self care or connecting with others.  Days 4 of each week will be given to a mindfulness practice.  Day 5 of each week will be given to a  different meditative practice.  Day 6 of each week will be saved as an opportunity to reflect on the week and to choose a favorite practice to repeat.

If there’s terms mentioned above that you are unfamiliar with, or if