Advent: A different take on the holiday season
In late fall, after all the Halloween candy has been consumed and the fall décor removed from store clearance aisles, we step on a conveyor belt heading straight for Christmas. Even those hangers-on who kept their rotting pumpkins on their porches through Thanksgiving finally pull out the twinkle lights and decorate their trees. Christmas music blasts in every store. Eggnog and cookies are consumed at will. For many people, the span of weeks from Thanksgiving to Christmas is a blur of planning, partying and shopping.
Some would argue there is nothing wrong with this. We’ve been well trained to rehearse, “It’s the most wonderful time of the year!” And in many ways, it is. I love eggnog. But the relentless rush toward Christmas — and its uniquely consumeristic zeal — falls short of the season’s true meaning. It can run us ragged at best or leave us feeling hollow at worst. Many of us will wake up on Christmas morning burnt out and broke, pretending to feel happy even if we don’t.
Historically, those who celebrated Christmas prepared for it very differently than we do today. In the weeks after Thanksgiving, they observed Advent, a season of self-reflection and repentance. With roots in the fourth century, Advent cultivates the opposite of the “shop ‘til you drop, fake it ‘til you make it” kind of holiday cheer that has come to characterize American expressions of the season. It is not holly or jolly. However, in an era of widespread cultural disillusionment, of political violence and loneliness and mistrust, I believe Advent is an especially timely gift for modern people.
“For Christians,” Tish Harrison Warren writes, “Christmas is a celebration of Jesus’ birth — that light has come into darkness and, as the Gospel of John says, ‘the darkness could not overcome it.’ But Advent bids us first to pause and to look, with complete honesty, at that darkness.”
Advent invites us to get in touch with the ways our world needs healing — and the ways we need healing. In the time leading up to the joy of Christmas, we needn’t pretend everything is fine when it isn’t. Instead, we can acknowledge the ways we aren’t fine and don’t know how to fix it. We can put ourselves in the way of the gift we all need.
On Thanksgiving Day in 2018, I woke up to learn that my brother had died by suicide. In the disorientation of that grief, I felt jarringly out of touch with “the Christmas spirit.” My lifeline that year was Advent: the permission to name my pain and to ask for God to come into it. At my church, I was comforted by the minor key music of Advent hymns and the sparsely decorated sanctuary. At home I lit the candles of my Advent wreath and prayed wordlessly, understanding perhaps for the first time that this place of wordless desperation, this ache, is where we encounter the real power of the Christmas story. The light of the world comes not to a comfortably lit room, but into the terror of darkness.
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The sting of my grief has lessened over the years, but in my ministry as a pastor I have seen the importance of Advent for people in all kinds of situations. Whether we are reeling from a recent loss or celebrating a new member in the family, whether we are pleased with the current state of public life or despairing over it, Advent invites us to pause and reflect. It’s a time to take inventory not only of our wishlists and meal plans, but also of our hearts. During Advent we ask, “What needs renewal in my life and in our world?”
That renewal won’t be found on a rack at Nordstrom or through our collective positivity. Counterintuitively, perhaps, this is good news: peace on earth ultimately isn’t up to us. But it is on offer. The Christmas story reminds us that our rescue comes in the form we might least expect: A baby, wrapped in blankets, is somehow the one who will change everything. I still don’t fully understand this story, but I find it more beautiful than anything of my own making. Grace doesn’t need to make sense; it only needs to be received. That’s what makes Christmas a gift.
(Hannah Miller King is a priest at the Vine Anglican Church in Clyde and the author of 'Feasting On Hope: How God Sets a Table in the Wilderness.”)
