Father Joseph Johnson in his homily for the First Sunday of Advent at the Cathedral of St. Paul reflected on something that is very much in the air right now, at least for me and those whom I know and read: the continuing exteriorizing of life. He chose to contrast the life of Facebook, Twitter, e-mail, texting and blogging – blogging  I tell you! – with the lack or loss of the interior life. I know he has a point and the point is well taken. I am blogging about his point now and I will tweet about this blog and note my blog post as my Facebook status as soon as I am finished writing. But he really does have a point, that as individuals in this culture of exterior life, we need to move inside, and get to know ourselves as beings in relationship with the Creator. We need to pray and we need to be quiet. We need to reflect on our lives and think about who we are.  We can only do that by cultivating time for ourselves. For me, it is even more than that. We live in a culture that treasures extroverts and ignores introverts. We think of extroverts as “doers,” but we are much in need of the life of introversion, which means we need to start valuing the gifts of the quiet among us, of the contemplatives in our midst.  We need the opposite of the Nike slogan, “Just Do It;” we need, “Just Contemplate.”

Fr. Johnson suggested that in preparation for Christmas, we might throughout Advent do three things to cultivate our interior lives:

1) Do not shop on Sunday. Use Sundays as the days on which you begin to work on your relationship with God, not just in Church, but throughout the day;

2) Make time every day to be with God; spend time in prayer in order to take time to look inside and create a deeper relationship with God;

3) Appreciate life, both in terms of your own life and that of all life around you. In times of economic troubles, and many other troubles, it can be difficult to appreciate the gift of life itself. When we become wrapped up in the exterior life, what is going on “outside” of me, we can lose sight of our interior life. Life is good, though, a gift from God, and even in the midst of painful events “outside,” we can still cultivate an interior sense of the goodness of life through our relationship with God. Life is a gift.

These three things, I thought, were interesting starting points for focusing our spiritual lives in the midst of the annual shopping frenzies, family gatherings and parties of Advent and Christmastide.  Are there methods, new or old, which you use to focus on the spiritual realities of Advent and Christmas?

John W. Martens

Follow me on Twitter @johnwmartens

John W. Martens is an associate professor of theology at the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minn,where he teaches early Christianity and Judaism. He also directs the Master of Arts in Theology program at the St. Paul Seminary School of Divinity. He was born in Vancouver, B.C. into a Mennonite family that had decided to confront modernity in an urban setting. His post-secondary education began at Tabor College, Hillsboro, Kansas, came to an abrupt stop, then started again at Vancouver Community College, where his interest in Judaism and Christianity in the earliest centuries emerged. He then studied at St. Michael's College, University of Toronto, and McMaster University, with stops at University of Haifa and University of Tubingen. His writing often explores the intersection of Jewish, Christian and Greco-Roman culture and belief, such as in "let the little children come to me: Children and Childhood in Early Christianity" (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009), but he is not beyond jumping into the intersection of modernity and ancient religion, as in "The End of the World: The Apocalyptic Imagination in Film and Television" (Winnipeg: J. Gordon Shillingford Press, 2003). He blogs at  www.biblejunkies.com and at www.americamagazine.org for "The Good Word." You can follow him on Twitter @biblejunkies, where he would be excited to welcome you to his random and obscure interests, which range from the Vancouver Canucks and Minnesota Timberwolves, to his dog, and 70s punk, pop and rock. When he can, he brings students to Greece, Turkey and Rome to explore the artifacts and landscape of the ancient world. He lives in St. Paul with his wife and has two sons. He is certain that the world will not end until the Vancouver Canucks have won the Stanley Cup, as evidence has emerged from the Revelation of John, 1 Enoch, 2 Baruch, and 4 Ezra which all point in this direction.