Chapel Corner: Honest Advent

Since this Thursday is Thanksgiving, we will not be having Chapel! Instead, use this time to celebrate the things you have been grateful for during this year and look forward to Advent, which begins next Sunday.

As the Chapel Team was searching for ways to celebrate Advent from a distance, Scott Erickson (@scottthepainter on Instagram) published a book called Honest Advent. On his website, Scott writes…

Is the Christmas story just something that happened a long time ago . . . or is it a story that is still happening today?

For too many of us the celebration of Christmas has lost its wonder. Maybe for you it has become a bittersweet season of complicated family rituals, or a predictable brand masking unquenchable consumerism, or simply a sacred story that feels far from any relevance in our current chaotic world.

Honest Advent seeks to illuminate the astonishing, hope-filled truth that the God who showed up in the hardest parts of our humanity is still showing up todayin those same places.

Celebrated artist-storyteller Scott Erickson gives us 25 days of refreshingly new illustrations and meditations to rekindle the wonder of God-with-Us in this season. We often forget that the encounter with the incarnate Christ happens in unexpected places, like a pregnancy announcement in an time of political unrest and empirical bloodshed, the morning sickness of a Middle Eastern teenager, or the shocking biology of home birth that goes far beyond the sanitized brand of Christmas as we know it.

Through contemplative observations, sacred questioning, and honest prayers, you will discover that the wonder of God-with-Us is still happening today – in your unexpected change of plans, your unaccomplished dreams, your unforeseen message in the stars, your humble new beginnings. “Let’s go and see” is the relevant invitation to finding God-With-us today as it was back then.

In an effort to celebrate together, we have hung up posters of the stations of Advent that Scott has created in the Olsson Lounge in Nyvall Hall! You are encouraged to go in, follow the stations, and once you have finished the stations, reflect on what you have felt or understood differently based on these images. Leave a note in the lounge with your thoughts and there are a few of Scott’s books in the lounge for you to take one copy of to use during Advent. Enjoy!

If you cannot make it to campus, here are the stations!