Waiting for Waiting
“…all human wisdom is contained in these words: Wait and hope!”
“You can’t wait to start waiting?” a classmate joked a few weeks ago when I mentioned that this year—like every other—I couldn’t wait for Advent to arrive.
Depending on your background, the season of Advent may be completely foreign to you, or it may be old hat. Maybe it evokes images of candles or of calendars filled with candies or chocolates or (preferably, in a year like 2020) booze. Growing up, I had only the vaguest idea that Advent even existed. I remember being confused when my third grade teacher was lighting brightly colored candles throughout the month of December and little else. Later in life, I would come to recognize that Advent was about preparing for Christmas, but I still could not have told you much more than that. Still, this time three years ago, as the year was coming to the end, I found myself wanting, and I found myself waiting. In every year since and for whatever reasons—there is usually a conspiracy of them—as November rolls around I find myself back in this place: wanting and waiting.
Enter Advent.
Advent, of course, just means “arrival” or “a coming into being or use.” (Thanks Merriam-Webster, for always refining my definitions, feeding my appetite for pedantry, etc.) In the Christian liturgical calendar, Advent takes place in the four weeks leading up to Christmastide, a time where Christians remember how it was that the Christ came into the world and anticipate the coming of Christ into the world again. The second coming is the true focal point of Advent, which is ultimately a season about looking forward. We remember the past, the first coming of Christ, so that we know what to look for now as we await Christ’s coming into the world again.
The spirit of Christmas (rightly) sings that in Christ’s name “all oppression shall cease,” while Advent looks around and acknowledges that oppression is still running rampant.
Ever since I discovered it three years ago, the posture of Advent has felt like the most honest way that I can hold myself in the world as a Christian. This is because Advent is a time of soaking in the reality that all is not right with the world and that all is not right with myself. It is a time for reflecting on the reality there is evil in the world that acts upon me, and that I often act in evil ways upon the world. In contrast to the intoxicating expression of what I call “Christmas and Easter” Christianity, which tries to skip over the suffering of the present moment, Advent is sobering. The spirit of Christmas (rightly) sings that in Christ’s name “all oppression shall cease,” while Advent looks around and acknowledges that oppression is still running rampant. Advent acknowledges this cessation seems to be a distant reality even if we believe it is inevitable. For the theology nerds among us, Advent holds the eschatological tension of already-not-yet. Advent has the courage to hold onto the “not yet,” even though Christ has already come.
Despite its remembrance of the Christmas story, Advent has the courage to say, “All is still not well.”
The manner of Christ’s first coming into the world teaches us as much. You might not know it if you walked into any given Christmas service this year, but the problems of the world were not fixed with Christ’s first heartbeat. In many ways, Christ’s coming into the world accentuated the messiness of the world, if we are to believe the traditional Christian telling of the story: it led to pretty severe disruptions in the lives of Joseph and, more importantly, Mary, for whom an unplanned and inexplicable pregnancy would not have been on the agenda; it led, too, to the murder of dozens of baby boys at the hands of a tyrant who feared being displaced by Mary’s son; it led Mary, Joseph, and Jesus on a refugee flight to Egypt to avoid this fate. God may have spared Jesus miraculously here, but I cannot imagine that was much consolation for the mothers whose sons were not spared similarly. Even after this and presumably other heartache, we believe that Jesus spent three decades doing who-knows-what before beginning his work on earth. Of course, God would ultimately not spare Jesus either. But that’s the subject for a post at a different time in the liturgical calendar.
When we look honestly at the circumstances surrounding the first coming of Christ, we come to the same starting point that we come to when we look honestly at the world around us, what I have said is the premise of Advent: All is not well. While this is true in any month in any year, I imagine few need convincing of this as we round out 2020. Sickness, natural disasters, isolation, sociopolitical and economic decay, and strained relationships all serve as reminders of this fact. For much of this year, whether we like it or not (and my guess is not), we have been waiting: for vaccines, for election results, for normalcy, for justice, for peace. We have faced our powerlessness to provide immediate or sometimes even eventual solutions to these problems, and we have probably faced our own complicity in causing many of these problems in the first place. In any case, we have to face the reality that the resolutions to our problems are often much further away than we would like them to be. For much of this year, whether we like it or not, we have been thrust into the posture of Advent: the posture of waiting.
Advent, however, invites a special kind of waiting. It is not a passive, twiddle-your-thumbs kind of waiting. If you will indulge my love of words (read: pretension) a second time, I think the French attendre, which we translate “to wait” and is cognate to the English “attend,” is helpful here. In Advent, we are attending to ourselves and to the world as we wait for God to penetrate into us and into it. On the heels of acknowledging that all is not well, in Advent we affirm hope in a belief that God is coming—present progressive tense—to do something about it, and we wait expectantly for this future coming. What is the nature of this attending?
“…it is the recollected one, the bold virgin with a heart in love with God who makes a sanctuary of her life, who delivers Christ who then delivers us.” —Loretta Ross-Gotta
More than anything else, I submit that this attending to ourselves is about creating and holding space within ourselves for God to enter into the world again. Mary serves as the archetype of human openness to the God’s in-breaking, and we posture ourselves after her as we anticipate the coming of Christ into the world today. In one of my favorite Advent reflections, Loretta Ross-Gotta refers to this waiting or attending as “recollecting,” or choosing to be rather than to do, trusting through the work of God that “something of great and saving importance is growing and kicking its heels in you.” Harkening back to to the first Advent of Christ, Ross-Gotta reminds us that “it is the recollected one, the bold virgin with a heart in love with God who makes a sanctuary of her life, who delivers Christ who then delivers us.”
It should not need saying that neither Ross-Gotta nor I are arguing that one need be a literal virgin to deliver Christ into the world. The emphasis, instead, is on Mary’s openness to the future that God was creating, her willingness to allow God to work in ways that would prove both surprising and painful. In the season of Advent, we labor to create space for Christ to continue to come, offering our bodies to be the place where God’s tomorrow enters into our today.
Advent is like a good asana—a good yoga pose—where we hold discomfort and find balance by stretching both forward and backward, creating space in our center. In our time of Waiting, we stretch backwards to remember how God has come into the world that we may better stretch forwards towards the reality that God is coming into the world again, and this as we speak. We hold in the tension of the present moment the historical reality that all is not well with a belief in a future reality that “all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well,” to quote St. Julian of Norwich. We seek space in ourselves to allow recognize and hold the tension of the present moment in our centers, finding space within ourselves. It is in this space that God enters our present, creating a new future from our broken pasts.
Advent is like a good asana—a good yoga pose—where we hold discomfort and find balance by stretching both forward and backward, creating space in our center
Still, as in the first Advent of Christ, this process of recreation is not immediate. It gestates within us like an embryo grows into a child that is then birthed into the world, and even still has much, much growing to do. There are labor pains and growing pains through this process of Christ’s continual coming. Alongside Mary, whose soul was pierced as by a sword in Christ’s coming, our anticipation that Christ is coming does not erase the pains of living in this world. Christmas may be coming, but it is not here yet. Even as December 25th comes and goes this year, much in the world and much in me will still be left wanting. Christ will still need to come.
The posture of Advent—its recognition that Christ still needs to come, its affirmation that Christ is coming, its reminder that this process is much slower than we would like it to be—is where I find myself living most of the year. During Advent, I feel like I can be more fully honest, more fully myself. This is why, each year, I find myself waiting for Advent, and I greet it with a sigh of relief.
Advent is here. The waiting is over!
Now, we just have to Wait.
Practicing Advent: An Addendum
When, three years ago, I found myself yearning for Advent, I did not know where to begin. I did not know how to practice this waiting, and I still have a lot to learn. On the recommendation of Laura Jean-Truman, who has a fantastic collection of Advent reflections, I purchased a copy of Watch For the Light, which is a phenomenal collection of essays and poems that get to the soul of Advent. I have found it to be tremendously helpful the past two years, and I expect to return to this anthology many times over the years to come. I also love John Polkinghorne’s Living with Hope, which is a collection of shorter Advent readings. This year, I’ll be reading through Scott Erickson’s Honest Advent—thanks, Mum!—and I am excited to use this book as a guide for the first time this year and try something different.
As a bookish type, the most natural entry point for me has been to find something to read. This has been all well-and-good; like I said, I’m reading something again this time around. But this year, more than previously, I have a sense that cultivating openness through stillness and silence is the most important Advent practice for me this year. This work of contemplation is how I find myself becoming “recollected,” able to hear God speaking to me and see God entering into the world. So I’ll also be trying to practice at least twenty minutes of silence each day of Advent.
These are all just suggestions. I only include them to create a point of departure for anyone who might, like I was, want to enter the spirit of Advent without knowing how to begin. If they seem like a lot, find something smaller—maybe silence for five minutes is a good place for you to start.
Here, too, Advent is like yoga: The best practice is the one you can do every day.
Notes
Loretta Ross-Gotta, “To Be Virgin,” in Watch for the Light, Plough Publishing House, 2000, 97.
Ibid., 99.
See Luke 2:34-35
