December 6
The First Week in Advent
 
 This is the weekend of our church's annual Christmas fair.  Volunteers spend months getting ready: knitting sweaters, constructing wooden toys, baking pies and cookies, fashioning tree ornaments out of clothespins and pinecones.    But there is always a rush for the room euphemistically known as “the King’s Treasures.”   Tables are full of  unmatched coffee cups, cookie jars, costume jewelry, jigsaw puzzles, tacky Christmas decorations, kitchen gadgets—things sometimes known as rummage.    I confess that I always check out that room, too.   I never intend to buy anything.   Sometimes I vow not to even go in there.   But there is an irresistible draw, a primal quest to find the one thing that will make my life complete, or the fear that if I don't go, I will miss it.   One year I was rewarded by the acquisition of a pink hippopotamus cookie jar;  another year I came home with a four-foot tin snowman;  still better, a necktie decorated with hound dogs that barked "We wish you a merry Christmas."

Of course, none of these things fall under the category of "needed."   Our lives are littered with excess, and the stuff never leaves us satisfied that at last we have enough.    Our world, instead, runs on the demand always to acquire more, newer, better stuff.   Wendell Berry reminds us not to pray for a new heaven or earth, but to be so "quiet in heart, and in eye clear," that we will realize, in the end, that "what we need is here."

What I Need

I am afflicted with desire,
hungering for something
I can not name.
My walls are hung with beauty,
my shelves groan with books,
and I am lulled to senselessness
by magical electronics
that know where I am at all times.
But sometimes I do not know
where I am.
Sometimes I long to find myself
in some quiet place
where love alone dwells.
Give me a star, Lord.
Lead me to Bethlehem.

--Timothy Haut, December 6, 2013