Advent is the time of waiting and preparation for the coming of Jesus. The word has its origin in the Latin adventus, meaning “coming”. It’s a time of looking forward to the One who is coming - a time of expectation.
Our thoughts, perhaps, go immediately to Christmas (because that’s what’s in the offing, after all) and to Mary and to Luke’s Annunication story. At the first sign of Christmas, we’re into that joyful world of shepherds and angels and glad tidings. Yet Advent is not about that sort of joy. It’s about the time of waiting itself - time that hangs heavy; time that erodes faith and destroys confidence; time that saps the soul and reduces life to mere existence. That is what Advent time ought to feel like. That is the experience into which we try to enter as part of the spiritual discipline of “waiting on God”, because the point is to try and recapture the sense of what it was like without Christmas to look forward to. A bit like C S Lewis’s Narnia under the White Witch: “always winter but never Christmas!”
A spirituality of Exile
In biblical terms, it’s like the experience of Israel (Judah) in Exile in Babylon. Exile is the great destroyer of faith. This is where Yahweh is “on trial” for breaking Covenant. Exile wrecks all previous notions of Yahweh’s covenantal faithfulness, because confidence in Yahweh’s promises of safety, protection, a Davidic king for all time and the sacred importance of Jerusalem and the temple lies broken in the rubble of Babylonian destruction.
Exile is the crucible of Old Testament faith, because it was the time when everything had to be re-built - just as the city was rebuilt under Cyrus the Persian, some 50 years later. Slowly, painstakingly, the articles of faith are picked up, dusted off, and examined to see what is left that can be salvaged. This is the time, most scholars believe, when the Old Testament received its final re-editing, giving us the form in which we now have it. That is not to say that the stories and traditions themselves date back only so far; rather, that the period immediately following the Return from Exile is the time during which the whole of the past - and of past faith - is recast in the light of the terrifying, soul-destroying reality and experience of Exile.
Israel’s birth-cries had been those of the Hebrew slaves in the brick-pits of Pharaoh; Yahweh had heard, and liberated them from Egypt in the Exodus. Exile was the living death out of which Israel’s cries for deliverance became the cries of rebirth through the return to Judah and the reconstruction of the city and temple. Advent is the time of crying - of impatient and agonised waiting for the deliverance from God that is the only means of hope for Life.
A spirituality of messianic longing and expectation
The context into which Jesus was born was again one of bondage and fevered expectation. Judah was under Roman occupation, and gripped by messianic fever. “What about the Romans?” is the question on everyone’s lips. The religious answer was that Yahweh’s Messiah was about to arrive - at any moment! The prayers for deliverance - for the coming of the Messiah - were like the Bat-signal over Gotham City: “We’re in deep trouble; come and save us!”
One way in which the religious teachers spoke of the time of waiting for the Messiah was of Exile; yes, the Return had happened, but it had never been what it was cracked up to be! The Return under Cyrus had simply ushered in a history of repeated occupation under hostile foreign powers. Judah was forever a colony - with a client-king, maybe, but a colony for all that. The Holy City was occupied; the temple was allowed to operate, but Yahweh’s People lived by the grace of the Romans, not of God. The Messiah, therefore, twas coming! He would be the Deliverer - the Royal Son of David - whose coming would destroy the last vestiges of domination, establish Jerusalem as a free city and bring about the “true Return from Exile”.
That is the theme of one of the greatest Advent hymns: O come, O come, Immanuel, set to the tune of Veni Immanuel:
O come, O come Immanuel
and ransom captive Israel
that mourns in lonely exile here
until the Son of God appear.Rejoice! Rejoice!
Immanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.
Words and music, theology and atmosphere are inextricably linked to saturate the hymn in the agony of Advent waiting. The prayer for the coming of the Christ-child is the desperate call of the exiles. This is not a time of “happy waiting”, but a soulless time to be endured. The dirge of the music screams lament as the context and experience of waiting. The promise, when it comes, is not joyful (even though it is a command to rejoice!); in fact, the score comes perilously close to farce with the mournful notes of the refrain. Yet just as we Advent singers are to “rejoice in the face of the music”, so the “exiles” are encouraged to dig deep and find joy in the promised coming of Immanuel in the face of the perceived god forsakenness of the present.
A spirituality for sated consumers
But why this desperate, dirgy, almost-masochistic spirituality? Is this not something that is just a little unhealthy - one that plays into the worst excesses of Christian puritanical joylessness? After all, we know that Christ has come, and it is the celebration of his birth that we are anticipating. Should we not wait more expectantly - as though our ears were straining for the first note of the angel-song and our eyes for the first glimpse of the Star?
The answer is “No”. The darkness of Advent waiting is not about some sort of Puritan revival (I am not trying to be too technical here; I mean it in the sense of the definition of Puritanism that goes: “A Puritan is someone racked by the awful suspicion that someone, somewhere, is enjoying themselves!”). It is about cultivating a “God’s perspective” sense of the world as it appears when held up to the mirror of the Kingdom, for whose coming we pray every time we say the Lord’s Prayer. It is easy, in comfortable, economically padded circumstances that are free of persecution and challenge to imagine that things are “pretty alright, really!”; that there is nothing urgent or awful about the present; nothing that needs changing now (if not yesterday) and that only God can accomplish; no burgeoning sense of the absence of God that drives us daily either to our knees or to despair (or both).
In this soft, fluffy world, cocooned from the harsh realities of life experienced as a living hell (as it is for the majority of the planet’s human inhabitants), it is far too easy to look forward to Christmas as an “extra-powerful Happy Pill” that we all deserve once a year. Then it becomes a “Time Out!” when we put reality on hold by common agreement and (over-) indulge ourselves in rampant consumerism, consumption and sentimentality in equal measure - because we can.
Advent spirituality is quite deliberately the cultivation of a hunger - the hunger and thirst for righteousness; the desperate, action-generating desire for the coming of the Kingdom that spurs us to commit ourselves again - with more urgent faithfulness - to being the answer to the prayers of others; to “doing God’s will on earth as in heaven”.
A spirituality of mission
Advent isn’t primarily a focus on or even preparation for the babe in the manger; that leads to sentimental oohs and aahs over children in dressing gowns with towels or shawls over their heads. It is a looking forward to and hungering for the coming of the Kingdom that Jesus promised. We are not “Israel in Exile” - either in Babylon or under Roman occupation - but we are exiles in a world that needs desperately the moment when God’s promises come to fulfilment; when “peace and righteousness kiss”, when “God shall wipe away every tear from our eyes; when death shall be no more; when mourning and crying and pain will be no more”, because Jesus has made all things new.
That might sound like reasonably good news to us; to those who live on the margins of our communities, or our global economy; to those subsisting on a few dollars a day; to those whose thoughts and opinions are monitored and punished; to those for whom starvation for themselves and their children is a near shadow over every hard-won morsel of food, this is Good News! It is the difference between life and death. It appears like water in the desert; like the promise of the grain trucks in a famine-struck village. It is the catalyst for fervent, urgent longing and prayer - a prayer for the coming of God because it is impossible to live a day longer without God’s salvation.
We live habitually without God. We have chosen god forsakenness and, in the affluent West, have cushioned ourselves with military power, democracy and a high standard of living. We deceive ourselves into thinking that we have all we need; we comfort ourselves with the notion that we don’t need God because we don’t need saving and liberating. There is no sense of Gethsemane here; no sense that our faith needs re-kindling and renewing; no sense that life between the Resurrection and the Eschaton is a severe trial of faith for those who would follow the Way of the Cross. Advent becomes a formality rather than a fervent desire.
Advent spirituality is a discipline and means of conscientisation. It is a means of cutting through the habits and lies we tell ourselves; of re-connecting to the experience of those for whom God’s Kingdom is a desperate necessity rather than an inconvenience. Only then will we rediscover the wonder of Christmas and hear again the summons to join in God’s mission of saving the world. Only then will we pray, with genuine urgency and longing, for the coming of God’s Kingdom; for the doing of God’s will here on earth. Only then will we be able to echo the cries of the exiles: “O come, O come Immanuel!”
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This is excellent writing, Lawrence! I particularly appreciate “Exile is the great destroyer of faith. This is where Yahweh is “on trial” for breaking Covenant.” Everything you say about Advent waiting I agree with - but . . whilst this is what Advent waiting should feel like, I find I can only ‘feel’ it in an intellectual sense. I can’t manufacture feeling that isn’t there even though I wish it was. If it was, I might discover the motivation to do something about really ‘preparing the way’ of the coming Messiah in my world. Instead, I’m cocooned (as we all are) in material comfort and the sort of busy-ness that makes it so hard to prioritise. Maybe it’s in this sense that ‘the poor are blessed’.
I find myself thinking, “what is it that makes us feel things?” There’s plenty of bad news on TV and in the papers which might evoke feelings, but I find the feelings they evoke are generally guilt, anger, frustration - and powerlessness. Music has tremendous power - but the Christmas carols don’t do it for me. Any ideas?
Then again, there’s something rather pathetic about wanting to manufacture feeling, anyway. (Or is that what ‘art’ is?). Maybe it goes full circle, and that emotional emptiness is the very thing we need to be acknowledging. Whilst opening ourselves to the Holy Spirit who is the only one with the power to give us Christ-life.
I think you’re absolutely right about manfacturing feeling, Dick. We can’t and shouldn’t. Spirituality is a process - a growth and formation. I suppose what I’m saying is that it is when we immerse ourselves in Advent from these perspectives, we begin to change because our orientation changes. In other words, it’s a programme and process of transforming our perspective. That’s when feelings start to change in tandem.