The meaning of our lives is the shore eroding under the relentless waves of our technological and marketing preoccupations. The traumatic nature of this unnatural disaster is that our capacity to see what is happening is being decreased and the sand on which we stand continues to erode beneath our feet. In the midst of this creation we say we enjoy The Creator still speaks build your life on rock so that when your winds and waves come you might stand (c.f. Matt ???)

Now, less you think this is some melodramatic and existentially indulged blog post let us consider the season we are fast approaching in December. These days (increasingly no different than the rest of the year) are inundated with information at a pace that is not only overwhelming but increasingly decreasing our ability to reflect on life and our living. There’s a shear and relentless restlessness among us. It comes from the information supplied by the marketeers among us who prod us to pay attention to that which is inherently ephemeral. This only increases in a season that is ironically about eternal things—The Eternal One. Anything to distract us from that which can save us will do. The irony is we have sold our God given capacity to reflect on our lives and to discover the meaning inherently within (i.g. Imago Dei) to those who would sell another meaning back to us in appliances, gadgets, and other things that will be sold at a fraction of the cost 8 years from now. At Christmas, the marketeers yet again have convinced us to trade our savings for His Salvation.

The sand beneath our feet is washing away and yet we stand with a smile on our face.

Advent, ironically, a season of such happiness, cards, gifts, togetherness and festivities is a penitential season in the life of the church.

Today, I hear an invitation for us to allow fro some Advent-urous Re-Thinking in our lives. Instead of allowing this years holidays, Christmas, or whatever we call it to come and go and to come out with nothing but the glazed over look of an experience that was self-indulgent might we close our eyes, withdraw from the frenzy and ask for The Gift of The Christ to be born within—again? That we might see the life we’ve been given and live?

There’s much more that could be said, and someone much smarter than I could wax eloquent on it, but the rest of this post can only be written in the intimacy of your own quiet time with God. My hope for us all this season is that God will help us to do some Advent-urous Re-Thinking—to know the meaning He has given us in the image we are made in and The Image that is born among us this Christmas, which will save us and restore to us the joy of His salvation.

As Merton’s title and my lack of footnotes (as if someone else could claim the right to some originality—there’s nothing new under the sun) suggest these thoughts in this post are Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander.