The Mad Parson

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers are the jam.

1981’s “The Waiting” could easily be an Advent song: “The waiting is the hardest part. Every day you get one more yard. You take it on faith; you take it to the heart. The waiting is the hardest part.”

And nobody does waiting like the Benedictines. They do patience like I do caffeine–naturally. So it’s no surprise that these Vespers Ninjas are on a different Christmas cycle than most. In some Benedictine ministries that involve children, they’ll toss up a Christmas tree when everyone else does. Okay, scratch that. Since I saw trees on sale in September this year, that’s not quite accurate. But around the beginning of December, the Benedictines will get all “deck the halls”-ish.

But that’s only for the kids. Otherwise, the Benedictines wait until–yep–December 17th to put up trees, et cetera. Then, they begin a twenty-one day cycle of reflecting on the meaning of Christ’s incarnation. Of course, this puts them way out of whack of everyone else, but even that reminds the Benedictines that they’re really not a part of this world, anyway. They have different values; they’re on a different wavelength.

It also reminds them–and us!–that Christmas isn’t a day. It’s a way of thinking. It’s a focus on Someone who voluntarily came into all of our crap and dragged us kicking and screaming out of it. It’s a pause and a patience, a reflection that a Man died so that we wouldn’t have to, an acknowledgement that–just in showing up–he turned the world on its head and made us something new.

Of course, when you look at it that way, the tinsel and eggnog and trees are still fun, but they don’t command quite the same importance that maybe they did previously. The Benedictines cultivate this outlook by waiting. . .waiting. . .waiting. We can, too.