Everything Falls Apart
reflections on hope for the first week of Advent
This weekend, because I am a nerd, I read a fascinating article in WIRED magazine about the work of a Hungarian mathematician and an American geophysicist who used their combined brilliance to create a predictive template for the way that virtually *everything* cracks apart — from granite to mud flats to Alaskan permafrost to a wine glass dropped on your kitchen floor.
Long story very short — every solid breaks into one of several predictable patterns.
And it struck me, as I finished the article and turned my attention to the morning news, that things here on Earth have almost always fallen apart in a predictable way.
Here’s the problem: the fact that we can predict *how* things will fall apart doesn’t mean we can stop it from happening.
+ + +
Until I was thirty, the only thing I knew about Advent was that one of my best friends always had an Advent calendar at her house in December — the plastic kind with tear-off paper panels and pieces of gritty, grainy chocolate underneath. The chocolate itself was so disappointing, I never really bothered to ask many questions about Advent. (Memo to Advent calendar-makers: your evangelism sucks.)
But thanks to my exile from fundamentalism and subsequent adoption by the Methodists, I have since learned to love Advent — the four-week liturgical season of preparation that precedes Christmas — for many reasons, not the least of which is the intentional extension of the holiday season beyond the usual hustle and bustle of shopping, gifting, and eating. The practice of lighting a candle before bedtime each evening, turning off the lights, and talking with my family about our shared human need for hope, peace, joy, and love has become my very favorite part of Christmas.
Advent has, in many ways, re-framed the entire meaning of Christmas for me — it turns out that the more I practice Advent, the less comfortable I am with the consumerism of the holiday season as a whole. After all, is it really fitting to celebrate the birth of Christ by spending significant amounts of time and money on presents for comparably wealthy people who don’t actually *need* anything, when my shopping takes me past houseless men and women huddled on street corners, some holding signs, some sharing bottles for warmth?
The apathy of my fellow drivers — gaze pointed straight ahead, avoiding eye contact or even acknowledgment — reminds me yet again that things here on Earth have always fallen apart in predictable ways: along the fault-lines of our refusal to be our brother’s keeper.
This year, in particular, it feels as though we are watching everything fall apart: our national health, our democratic institutions, the financial solvency of our friends’ businesses, the quality of our civil discourse, our family relationships, our children’s education, our dreams for the future… and even though we can describe and even predict how the disintegration will unfold, we are powerless to stop it from happening.
Which brings me to the words of the ancient prophet Isaiah, addressing the Divine — from the prescribed reading for this first week of Advent, 2020:
“Oh, that You would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence.”
I feel like Isaiah gets me.
He goes on to describe the total degradation of the society around him: everything in shambles, chaotic and ruined: “We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.”
In other words: our best efforts just aren’t enough to keep it together.
We can point to the pain.
We can even name the problems — these cracks of our very own making:
Disease.
Crippling poverty.
Rampant assholery.
Racism.
Worship of power.
State-sanctioned violence.
Greed.
Lies.
Exploitation & colonization.
Predatory fear-mongering.
Truly, every human society falls apart in the same way.
But we are powerless, it seems, to bring the rough edges back into alignment.
The first week of Advent is traditionally the week of HOPE, and honestly, the last thing I want is someone flinging hyper-positive Pollyanna preacher platitudes at me, like the birth of Jesus magically fixes everything. Spoiler alert: it’s been 2000 years since his arrival in the flesh, and humanity’s proclivity for screwups doesn’t appear to have shifted much.
So I shake my fist at the winter sky, and wish like hell the heavens would split open, because right now a divine smackdown seems like a welcome change of pace.
Isaiah gets me.
+ + +
I am watching the social fractures happen in real time, and a nagging question keeps coming back to me:
What if these cracks aren’t actually a problem to solve?
What if the splitting open, the rending, the inability to mend — is exactly what we need?
What if we’re built to fall apart? What if things HAVE TO fall apart?
What if that IS the hope?
That in the breaking apart, the new and the beautiful has a fighting chance to emerge?
I’m a problem-solver by nature, which means that I’m happiest when I have a strategy in place to efficiently fix — nay, improve! — whatever is broken. Sitting around while things are breaking, and allowing the disintegration to unfold? Well, that’s basically a description of my own personal hell.
But what if my impulse to keep the breakdown from happening — to find a workable solution — is as counterproductive to the redemptive purposes of God as it is exhausting to my spirit?
The subversive, restorative, re-nascent beauty that God desires to bring into being simply cannot survive alongside the structures that currently exist — in society, in government, in the church, in my family, in ME — so are those structures really worth saving?
Or is it finally time for everything to break apart?
I’m playing Leonard Cohen on repeat this week, listening to Anthem like a hymn:
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There’s a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in….
Welcome to Advent, friends.
Everything is falling apart.
Hallelujah — that’s how the Light gets in.
Amen.
Join the conversation, friends! Talking to myself is weird.
Where are you learning to release what’s breaking/broken this Advent?
Where are you discovering defiant hope?
Been feeling a lot of career angst lately. Which seems petty the midst of a pandemic and mass suffering. I'm trying to sit with that feeling and listen, to myself, to God, and see what happens.
I recently heard that hope is living in the possible not the probable, which I like. I'm not a blind optimist, but I've seen things work out enough times that I know the brokenness, although a constant in life, isn't final.
Very glad I stumbled upon your blog!
This is an amazing article! I love that you're putting your words into the world. I like the idea that perhaps things must be broken to let the light shine through and not just fixed or sealed over. That we might just have to let the system break to rebuild.
Great job Mom!