Zondervan’s blog occasionally features essays from our authors. Today’s essay is by John Koessler, author of A Stranger in the House of God.

The Perfect Gift?

Recently Newsweek’s cover story was about the Kindle, Amazon’s electronic reading device. Amazon, of course, is the online retailer that revolutionized the bookselling. Now it has set its sights on an even loftier goal. It wants to re-engineer the book.

The Kindle is light, just over 10 ounces and its physical design, while not imitating the bound pages of a book, stylistically evokes the memory of a book. So what can Kindle do that a book can’t do? It can change the font size with the push of a button. It can store 200 books at a time. Readers can leave an electronic bookmark and make notes that are stored on Amazon’s servers.

Will the Kindle eventually replace the book? Probably not. At least, not in my lifetime. As any book lover knows, the joy of reading is not just about information. It’s about the experience. There is more to a book than mere words on page. There is the feel of the paper and the beauty of the type. There is the reassurance we get from the weight of the thing. Not the gravity of the subject matter but the physical weight of the bound pages. For all its tricks, the Kindle will never be able to reproduces these aspects of the reader’s experience.

Nor will it be able provide a living record of a reader’s relationship with the book. No scrawled notes in the margin left in someone’s spidery hand. No backwards letters or stick figures scribbled by children who are long since grown and gone. No stains or creased pages to mark the stages of the reader’s first journey through the author’s world and no makeshift book mark, the torn page of some old magazine or grocery list, left between the pages like a miniature time capsule for a generation to come.

News of the release of the Kindle made me think back to a Christmas long past and the gift my mother had lovingly placed beneath our tree. Although I couldn’t see through the colorful wrapping, it’s sharp corners and rectangular shape left no doubt as to what was underneath. It was a copy of the complete Winnie-the-Poor and The House at Pooh Corner by A. A. Milne with decorations and new illustrations in full color by E. H. Shepard. The cream colored pages felt like velvet and smelled like licorice. My mother read it to me when I was small and decades later I took it from the shelf and read from it to my children. Today the binding is broken and its stained cover is tattered at the edges. Yet I cannot pick it up without feeling a measure of the wonder I first felt as a child. When Amazon’s Kindle can do that, I’ll buy it.

Zondervan’s blog occasionally features essays from our authors. Today’s essay is by John Koessler, author of A Stranger in the House of God.

The Music of Advent

Advent is the official beginning of the Christian season in the church calendar and begins on the fourth Sunday before Christmas. For me advent always begins after Thanksgiving. That’s because once Thanksgiving is finally gone, I feel justified in getting out my Christmas carols. Somehow playing them any earlier seems out of place, like wearing white shoes after Labor Day.

Nothing sets a seasonal mood like the old songs of Christmas. By that, I don’t mean the usual holiday fare you hear on the radio. These days holiday music is as ubiquitous on the radio as garland is on a Christmas tree. Every major city has at least one radio station that plays nothing but Christmas music in the days leading up to Christmas.

I suppose I should be glad. But the pop standards these channel’s feature do little for me. I don’t want to hear songs about Mommy kissing Santa Claus or how grandma got run over by a reindeer, though I confess to having a soft spot for anything sung by Nat King Cole, whether its holiday oriented or not. It’s real Christmas music that I want to hear.

By that I don’t mean old standards like “The First Noel,” “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” or “Silent Night.” Those songs seem over sung and tedious to me. No, I like my carols in a minor key, preferably with a hint of Gregorian chant. I like my carols sung by a choir in plainsong and Latin phrases. I want songs with haunting melodies and a hint of mystery. Songs that stir a longing in my heart like an echo that rises from the depths of some ancient cathedral.

The true theme of Advent is longing. It is a season that celebrates unfulfilled desire. The first advent, like the age in which we now live, was an in between time where God’s people dwelt in that grey land between promise and fulfillment. Most of us know that landscape well. We have spent much of our life there. Waiting for the right job. Waiting for the right person to come along. Waiting for the war to end and the economy to turn around. Waiting for God to answer our prayers.

Perhaps that’s why the church originally envisioned the advent celebration as a season of fasting, not as an orgy of preening, purchasing, and over eating. Advent is more about longing than it is about fulfillment and the best Christmas carols recognize this. That’s why there is always a note of sadness in them. They are not meant to cheer us but to make us aware of our hunger. The best Christmas carols do not make us smile. They move us to tears and compel us to add our own voices to the chorus the rings through the ages. The melody and lyrics may change. But the question is always the same: “How long, O Lord?”