“Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him.” - Matthew 2:2
Today is the first day of Advent. I think. I’m looking at a 2013 liturgical calendar because I’m too cheap to fork out $15 for a new one, so I might be wrong, but being wrong about the start of Advent is as good a way as any of putting words into this new blog, which I’ve called Pilgrim Dude, because 1) I’m a pilgrim (and so you are, even if you don’t know it yet), and 2) I’m a dude, like literally a man, but also a DUDE - I’m sitting in a papasan chair, in a bathrobe, with my long matted hair falling down over my tired morning eyes and all I’ve eaten in the past day and a half in an apple. (I also blog at Patheos, so if you’d like to hear my thoughts on economics and other such things, visit the Pickled Pencil. Truth be told, I don’t find it so easy to write about that stuff on a regular basis. But I do need to write, and that’s why this exists.)
Alright, we’re talking about Advent, which Google confirms does, indeed, begin today. Seems early. [The author took a writing break at this point to go to church, because if he’s going to write about Advent and other things he’d damned well better get himself to service on day one]. I got the inspiration for this blog (and possibly the name, I’m not sure) after spending a few years talking with my friend Joe Martyn Ricke, going to musicals and concerts, finding vegetarian food at late night diners, meeting creepy defense industry women in Indy, sharing our mutual disdain for Facebook, and generally finding ourselves exasperated at everything which our friends and neighbors have come to view as normal or even virtuous. He has a blog called Ben Camino Soul where he publishes his Ironic Advent Meditations, which I routinely misspell as Ironic Advent MediCATIONS. These things are a sweet relief from the anxiety and strain of northeast Indiana, where everyone’s work work workin to save a buck on a AR-15 and a chainsaw, and social media, where a single Tweet or post or comment could save the world (or at least your self-esteem).
Here’s an appropriate Thoreau quote (I’m full of these). “We are made to exaggerate the importance of what work we do; and yet how much is not done by us! Or, what if we had been taken sick? How vigilant we are! determined not to live by faith if we can avoid it; all the day long on the alert, at night we unwillingly say our prayers and commit ourselves to uncertainties.”
Joe has Ironic Advent Meditations copyrighted, or so he claims (he stole them from our friend Jennifer and they both stole them from their old pastor). He does not, however, have Ironic Advent MediCATIONS copyrighted. How’dya like that dose of irony, Joe? Eat it. (Though, he’d probably still have a case, something about “consumer confusion,” but what with his writing being so much better by comparison, I think I could wiggle out of that one, too).
But here’s the ironic part: “Medications” kinda works. That’s what Advent can be, a medication for what ails us, like Chicken Soup for the Soul (vomit vomit vomit). Thoreau wasn’t sure if it could be fixed, the hustling and the angst, the consumerism and the workaholism, the discontentment met by the mindless accumulation of dross. “A well-nigh incurable form of disease,” he called it. Seems to me we could stand to learn a little something about waiting, or at least slowing the hell down. Maybe instead of following Twitter social justice warriors and Christmas advertisements from Honda we should start following stars like the Magi. Your Advent pilgrimage won’t happen staring into a screen [The author is well aware that he is currently staring at a screen, it’s called irony]. "I don’t know what I’m hopin’ to see but it ain’t Facebook and it ain’t on TV.” A pilgrim dude I know wrote that.
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Thanks for reading. We’ve got a long ways to go, and as my Sith Master, Darth Joe, tells me: it’s gonna get dark and it’s gonna get difficult. “Everything we say has to be resisted as well as said.” That’s another Joe quote. Go read his MediTATION. But ignore the insults and threats about me. That’s just a part of his charm.
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