Lisa Allen-Agos­ti­ni

Ad­vent is a four-week pe­ri­od in the Chris­t­ian Church in which the church an­tic­i­pates the birth of Christ on Christ­mas Day–his­toric­i­ty aside. (This year Joseph Atwill's well-pub­li­cised re­search ar­gued there was no ac­tu­al per­son who was Je­sus the Christ; in ad­di­tion there is the com­mon un­der­stand­ing that, had He been born at all, it wouldn't have been on De­cem­ber 25.Many Christ­mas tra­di­tions are based on the non-Chris­t­ian cel­e­bra­tions of the win­ter sol­stice.)

Ad­vent, in the church, re­volves around some key im­ages and ideas: it is a sea­son of prepa­ra­tion as we wait for the birth of the ba­by in the manger, but it is al­so the time when we read of John the Bap­tist, Je­sus' pu­ta­tive cousin, cry­ing in the wilder­ness that the (adult) Christ is com­ing to save hu­man­i­ty from it­self.Chris­tians think of Ad­vent as a time of hope. I think at Ad­vent of a time of Hope.

Hope Aris­mendez, to be pre­cise. Hope, Sean, Akeil, Amy, and now Keyana, join a kind of hor­ror reel in my mind, es­pe­cial­ly at this time of year, pre­cise­ly be­cause of the con­trast of our ven­er­a­tion, churchi­cal and sec­u­lar alike, of an in­fant while in re­al life we beat, rape, ig­nore and gen­er­al­ly sav­age our own chil­dren.On Christ­mas Eve, when I was 11 years old, I told my moth­er I was be­ing mo­lest­ed by a close old­er rel­a­tive.

http://www.guardian.co.tt/dig­i­tal/new-mem­bers