🕯️ Week Four — A Joy That Repairs the World
Decolonial Advent: Embodied Hope in an Age of Uncertainty
Dear Becoming Ones,
If you’re new here, welcome. You’ve stepped into the middle of a journey — and sometimes journeys feel strange at first. I’m currently writing a seven-week exploration of (a) Decolonial Advent, reimagining this season not as a countdown to consumer Christmas, but as a time of anti-imperial waiting, collective repair, and embodied hope.
We’re using the Eastern Orthodox Calendar, which holds a longer, more spacious Advent — seven weeks instead of four — and honors the ancient longing for liberation that Christianity inherited from Judaism.
This week is Week Four of Seven, and I’m also drawing wisdom from Hanukkah, the Jewish Festival of Lights — a remembrance of resilience and the miracle of a small flame that refused to go out under occupation.
As the world accelerates toward collapse — environmental, political, spiritual — I find myself returning to stories that teach us how light survives, how hope takes root in the cracks, how communities remember who they are under the pressure of empire.
This season, I’m turning toward wisdom and wonder.
I’m turning toward the practices that help us stay human.
I hope you’ll journey with me into this expansive Advent —
a season of becoming.
With gratitude,
RCE+
🕯️ Week Four — A Joy That Repairs the World
Decolonial Advent: Embodied Hope in an Age of Uncertainty
Isaiah 11:1–10 & Matthew 3:1–12
“A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse…” — Isaiah 11:1
“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” — Matthew 3:2
The Vision: Joy as a Repairing Force
Joy is not a feeling.
It is a practice of repair —
an insurgent willingness to believe that another world is possible
even when all we can see is a stump
where a forest once stood.
Isaiah speaks of a shoot emerging from what empire has clear-cut.
The holy mountain is not a metaphor —
it is an ecological promise:
wolves and lambs belonging together
without taming or domination.
This is joy as ecosystemic liberation —
a joy that refuses the hierarchy of predator and prey.
A joy that interrupts violence
and imagines a commons
where all bodies are safe.
John appears in the wilderness
not to soothe our illusions
but to call us back to the humility of soil and water.
To turn around — Metanoia —
is to reject the rule of extraction
and choose the rule of communion.
Advent Contra Empire demands this:
not sentimental comfort,
but the trembling joy that grows
from the cracks of empire’s ruins.
The Challenge: Turning Toward Repair
John names our complicity.
The axe is already at the roots
of systems we have benefited from.
This joy does not bypass accountability.
It asks us to become
co-conspirators with the shoot
pushing up through the stump.
Joy that repairs
refuses neutrality.
It is Mary’s Magnificat in motion,
the politics of redistribution
at dinner tables and budget meetings
and border crossings.
It sings:
Let every valley lift up.
Let every wall come down.
Let justice be the celebration
we bring as a gift to the Christ child.
A Poetic Prayer
Come, Holy Shoot.
Break open the soil of our despair.
Let us be compost
for your coming world.
Teach us the joy
that refuses empire’s feast,
choosing instead
a shared loaf
and a healed mountain.
Amen.
Field Guide for Embodied Joy (Contra Empire)
Try one practice this week:
Redistribute Something
A bill. A meal. A coat.
Joy is a form of resource re-allocation.
Practice “Predator/Lamb” Solidarity
Sit with someone on the other side of a social divide.
Listen without needing to tame.
Plant or Tend Something Small
Participate in the shoot growing from the stump.
Name it as joy.
Practice Confession as Repair
Acknowledge one harm — then take one step toward repair.
Joy grows in the transparent spaces.