Live As If...

I'm not sure if that is the exact title of this invitational poem by Marge Piercy. I discovered it in announcements fragments I've been hording this fall from my church, Lake Street Church of Evanston.

Live as if you liked yourself, and it
may happen:
reach out, keep reaching out, keep
bringing in.
This is how we're going to live for a
long time: not always,
for every gardener knows that after the
digging, after the planting,
after the long season of tending and
growth, the harvest comes.

Okay, so maybe this is a little pre-adventish. Fall and harvest themes, after all. It's the living "as if" that touches my feelings about Christ's advent, though. It's the reaching, the digging, the planting. Back to the "waiting and working" advent spirituality I mentioned last week. I do not celebrate an advent or christmas that is merely going through the ritual motions of One birth long ago, like some childish reenactment. I celebrate, wait, and work, because indeed in Divine Nature's rhythms that age-old birth - like planting, digging, tending -- comes and comes and comes again.