Do you ever find yourself grumbling as you roll out of bed? As I splash my face with cold water I’m already complaining why it takes so long to get warm water to this faucet? I start worrying as well why technology shut down our email last evening. Things are just coming apart at the seams, I mumble. I start stressing this early over those two classes I’m teaching—good grief, why can’t I get my act together, like my good friend Tim Smith, who teaches four or five classes at the same time and produces those marvelous podcasts three times a week. What’s wrong with me?

Allow me a little personal note to explain why I am so filled with joy this morning. Wait a minute, filled with joy? Isn’t this the season of Lent, a time to ponder the death of our Lord, a time to recognize sorrow and suffering and sadness that courses through our lives and our world? We’ve got a valley of darkness to wade through before we can once again see sunrise on Easter morning. Resurrection can seem so far away at times.

In recent writing and teaching I’ve been talking about what I think is at least part of the sorry story of our baffling desire to cancel the cultural drivers of the past. We’ve stopped reading those big books or great poems; we’ve stopped viewing magnificent art. Worst of all we’ve stopped reading the Christian Bible as the animating center of what is true and good and beautiful. Those were the sources of deeper thoughtfulness in the past. Are we really ready to discard it all?

Life just seems to bump along most of the time, sort of staying the same a lot. We get up in the morning, maybe too late, maybe too early, splash cold water on our faces, and step into another day. So often we don’t expect much will be new, as we rush forward, checking our to-do lists, checking our calendars. It can get pretty routine.

There is a lot of talk these days, maybe especially among those like me who used to be English professors, about the astonishing decline of interest in the humanities, those subjects we know as literature, history, theology, biblical studies, philosophy, art, music. This decline is going on among all of us, not just students, but most certainly students are drawn to something, they believe, more certainly lucrative.

I have a vague memory of walking alongside my father, stumbling along actually, as we would venture out into one of the fields he was cultivating. Our treks usually took place on a Saturday or Sunday evening, checking on the crops before the week began. I was often invited to join him. I was thrilled. Oh the fragrance of honeydews and cantaloupes and watermelons.

After the First World War, the Great War, where some fourteen million died, bringing enormous disillusionment across the globe, from which perhaps we have never recovered, T. S. Eliot famously described the dry wasteland into which we have wandered.

I’d like to give you a list of ten things I’m following in order to live a better life in the year ahead. But I’ve never been a list-guy. That works for some people, I know, but not for me. I look out ahead and see fog over the landscape, night still hanging over the mountains, but then, sometimes suddenly, I catch a glimpse of the sunrise breaking in the distance. It’s that light, mysterious, yet ever so real, I long for as I step into the new year.

I love this Rembrandt painting depicting mother Mary tenderly tending her baby. She is so young, isn’t she, yet somehow she knows things already. She is holding the holy scriptures, well lined, long read, open I suspect to Isaiah and the other eloquent prophets, passages she has read all of her life over so many dinner tables.

Advent is rooted in a long history of waiting. None of us likes to wait very long, some of us less than others. As God’s people, though, we need to be prepared to wait. Even as we go through difficult personal traumas, or as we witness each day such horrific global eruptions, we must wait. Maybe that’s what Advent is teaching us, once again, as we wait for the baby Jesus to come and make all things right. That’s the Advent way.

I have just finished re-reading Henri Nouwen’s lovely Life of the Beloved: Spiritual Living In a Secular World. Nouwen tells the story how a young man named Fred asked him to write something that would speak to him and to his secular friends: “Put it in a language we can understand.” Their friendship began when this Jewish, secular, young writer for The New York Times, came to interview the renowned Christian priest and writer.

This week Sharon and I were making our periodic visit to the psychiatrist who has managed her meds so effectively. Sharon reported to him that she feels this awful bout with anxiety is over. The psychiatrist responded: “Well, it looks like the meds are doing what they should be doing.” And he surely is right.

I was sitting this morning in my prayer chair, that place where I spend so much early-morning time, praying, meditating, reflecting, reading the Psalms each day, studying other parts of Holy Scripture, when I caught a glimpse of my book cases across the room.

I am currently reading David Brooks’ fascinating new book, just out this week, How To Know A Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen. The book is timely, to say the least. With so much hatred floating around, so much judgment that separates us from one another, we need to learn better how to connect meaningfully with each other.

I just finished rereading, for the umpteenth time, the incomparable King Lear, by William Shakespeare, a play first performed in 1606, written by one of the greatest writers in the English language. I returned to this amazing play because someone alerted me there is wise counsel here on how we might grow older gracefully. I know I need help.

In the early days of the twentieth century, after the bloody confusions of WWI, at the beginning and shortly after the atrocities of WWII, W. H. Auden famously proclaimed ours to be “the age of anxiety.” For so many of our writers thereafter, and for many of us as well, Auden puts his finger on the pulse of our age.

We are taught there are various reasons to pray. I remember Tish Harrison Warren putting out a plea for “imprecatory prayer” during the early days of the bloody invasion of Ukraine. As we watched those first pictures of young mothers crouched down in subway corridors holding their babies, we wanted to invoke this ancient prayer: Lord, come now, banish the ruthless and violent in our midst.

Want to change your life? Want to find hope even in the midst of the suffering you are going through, the suffering you also witness daily throughout the world. I have a plan, actually not mine but St. Paul’s. It may sound a little naïve at first, disconnected from real world stuff, but think on this with me for a minute.

I’ve always been puzzled by the extensive use of enemy language in the Psalms. To be sure David knew real enemies. He lived and wrote under the clouds of huge geopolitical threats, so much of it seeking to crush and destroy the ancient kingdom of Judah. He wrote under fear that the homes of his people would be taken and his sacred city of Jerusalem would be reduced to rubble. Plenty to fear, from real enemies on the ground, to be sure.

In my last blog post I shared some pretty intimate details about the struggles Sharon and I are going through right now. I know most people don’t want to hear much about the dark times in other peoples’ lives, but I heard from a number of my readers that I was not totally clear last time about what’s going on for us, especially for my dear wife Sharon.