Making Room
No sooner do we put away or polish off the Thanksgiving leftovers, wash and dry the dishes and then move into the next holiday season. Whether you celebrate Christmas, Hanukah, or the Winter Solstice, we enter a time of expectation, planning...and making room. We make room in our schedules for shopping, decorating, and parties. And some of us literally make room in our homes for trees, guests and dining rearranging furniture or sleeping accommodations and putting extra leaves in the dining table.
In the Christian tradition, the time spent in expectation, planning and making room is called Advent. For Christians it is a time to prepare for the arrival of the Christ, celebrated as the birth of Jesus on Christmas. In a sense Advent is a way to ensure Christians are ready for Christmas ahead of time since, according to the birth legend in Luke’s gospel, Joseph arrived with Mary, who was ready to give birth, only to discover there was no room at the inn...no preparation had been made in anticipation of their arrival.
The implication being the world was ready or prepared for this what this child represents. It had not made room to receive him or his message, a message which arrived in a form few expected...a helpless, little baby. Which makes his relatively short life and eventual brutal death by execution less surprising. We can only truly receive what we are willing to make room for in our hearts.
The collected stories of Jesus’ life and teachings are known as the gospel, meaning “good news.” They point toward a way of being and responding to life that is very different from the norm of his time and of our own, a way that promises salvation (which I liken to a sort of radical freedom regardless of personal circumstances, rather than a destination after death).
There are of course other traditions that promise something akin to salvation through embodiment of a different way of living and responding to life, some of which seem universal, like compassion, forgiveness, generosity, gratitude, mercy, justice, etc. All ideas that we nod our heads in agreement with and make us feel good but that are, in practice, really difficult and often inconvenient for us to adhere to in our daily lives.
We might scoff that such teachings are impractical, unrealistic, or even expensive. And yes, it is true, they are not practical if we’re interested in business as usual. They are unrealistic if our vision of what life is and could be is limited only to what we have ever known, and it is expensive if our only means of measuring costs is counting dollars and cents. Religion and spiritual practices are not intended to teach us how to adapt to the status quo, they are meant to make us agents of its transformation.
When we talk about or even complain a spiritual teaching or practice as being impractical, unrealistic, or expensive we reveal two things to or about ourselves:
- We have some awareness that it contains the potential for a result that is different from the “norm”, maybe even transformative.
- We’re not ready for whatever the different/transformation is.
In other words, we haven’t made room for it in our hearts.
In this season of expectation, preparation and making room, let us let us give thanks for any and all awareness of our need or desire to make room in our hearts for teachings or practices that have the potential to transform us and our world. And may we continue to support and encourage one another to spiritual growth as individuals and covenantal community that we will make room, room at the inn of our hearts.
Questions for reflection:
What do you need/want to make room for in the inn of your heart?
What might you do to help prepare a place for it?
