What We're Reading This Advent
Six books — one for each week of Advent plus a bonus — that have shaped our staff's waiting.
The church office smells like pine resin and drugstore candy canes. Our receptionist has lit the first purple candle on the wreath by the coffee pot, and the staff is passing paperbacks across the table like trading cards. Advent is a reading season around here — not because we are especially literary, but because four weeks of waiting sits better in the chest when a book is helping us keep time. A page at breakfast. A page on the bus. A page with the youngest asleep on your lap and the tree lights blinking out of sync with the music.
Six titles, one slow calendar
Watch for the Light (Plough) — short daily readings from Bonhoeffer, Auden, Merton, and more. Pastor James has been handing this one out for a decade, and the copies on our shelf have the dog-eared pages to prove it.
Hidden Christmas by Tim Keller — the sermons that taught me Matthew's genealogy is not something to skim past.
Advent by Fleming Rutledge — dense, bracing, worth the flashlight under the covers.
Low by Mary Oliver and Malcolm Guite's Waiting on the Word — poems for the evenings when prose is too much.
Bonus: Silence and Beauty by Makoto Fujimura — for the weekend after Christmas when the house has gone quiet again.
A good book in Advent is a metronome. It will not rush the season, and it will not let you either.
Read slow, or don't read
You do not have to finish any of these. Advent is not a completion stamp. One paragraph held at a red light can do more than a full chapter swallowed on the way to sleep.
Short reviews will go up on the Journal each Friday. Read with us. Or keep your own list. Either way, may the waiting do its slow, good work in you.
