When I was a child, I always loved the Advent season. We didn’t have Advent wreaths and Advent calendars in those days; it was the dark purple color in the church and a certain drama in the Bible readings that impressed me. Clearly, there was something expectant and portentous about those weeks. However, I misunderstood the meaning. For many years, I thought that, during Advent, one was supposed to pretend that Jesus hadn’t been born, so that we would be more excited when Christmas came. Needless to say, this stratagem didn’t work. For me, it was a revelation years later to learn that the last
...more
