How come Advent is turning me into a grumpy old man? Advent is one of the two great so-called penitential seasons of the Christian Year. Advent is not Christmas, a point which is either not believed or widely ignored. But its proximity to Christmas, at any rate in our culture, destroys its special meaning and beauty, and its importance. And so now this time of the year gets to be all about food. We have multiple eating events. We prematurely sing Christmas carols all over the place. But never mind... I turn on the secular Radio NZ Concert Programme last Sunday morning and get the most sublime true Advent music, including the mighty Bach Advent chorale Wachet Auf... So I felt better.
Penitential does not mean we become grim and put on sackcloth and ashes. Penitential may be actually the wrong word. Archbishop Rowan Williams suggests there are two things we can do in Advent. The first is to pay attention to the enormous hunger for God, for meaning, for some word of assurance, that utterly pervades our secular culture. This hunger emerges in a thousand ways, some of them perverse, in our literature, our entertainment, our uses of leisure, our art, in our illnesses and mental health, in our social pathology... In Advent our discipline can be to recognise this hunger, in ourselves and all around us, these longings, the appalling moral anxiousness of our age -- just as the Jews long ago waited and yearned for what they called salvation, a messiah, a meaning for all their pain.
Secondly, says Rowan Williams, Advent may be when we take inventory of our idols. We will be surprised at what they actually are. One of the colourful ancient prophesies says: In that day we shall cast our idols of silver and our idols of gold, which we made each one for ourselves to worship, to the moles and to the bats (Isaiah 2:20). Advent is when contemplatives make sure that we know how easily we domesticate God to some idol reflecting ourselves and what we want. So Advent is when in a way we become Jews again, in obedience to the First and Second Commandments.
The God who comes may not be the God we expect -- and yet, in our stillness and silence we dare to hope for what one theologian calls a God of total and presuppositionless love. “Watch and pray”, signed off one pious friend in his Christmas email to me. Well, he is right. And we emerge from Advent with a clearer sense of what can be consigned to the moles and the bats.
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