Protecting Advent from Christmas – 14 December 2012

Advent, it seems to me, brings to the fore those aspects of Christian faith people find unsettling, the problems many don’t want to think about.  Why doesn’t God make everything right?  Why do good people suffer?  Where was God at Auschwitz?  How come Christ’s church is so sinful, hypocritical and embarrassing?  Why doesn’t simple faith protect me from anxiety, at least, if it’s not going to protect me from disaster?  Well, at least in Advent we are encouraged to look up and say honestly, No, the questions are not answered for us.  Faith then becomes faith again – that is to say, the faith of Abraham who went out at the call of an invisible God, not knowing where he was going.  Abraham was at God’s beck and call, not the other way around.  You have not chosen me, I have chosen you, said Jesus.  Faith, says the writer to the Hebrews, is the conviction of things not seen. On Whitsunday 1961, Dag Hammarskjöld, Secretary General of the United Nations, wrote in his diary:  I don’t know Who – or what – put the question, I don’t know when it was put.  I don’t even remember answering.  But at some moment I did answer Yes to Someone – or Something – and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life, in self-surrender, had a goal.

In December almost everyone is tearing around in a complex activity called Getting Ready For Christmas.  I think it illustrates how energetically we respond to familiar things that comfort and reassure us.  Family, for instance, and children.  Money, if we’ve got it and can spend it.  The sentimental carols and candlelight.  The memories of the past.  The comforting assurance of food and drink.  The prospect of sunshine and warmth.  Doing something for others in need.  The Christmas tree and all the lights, the nativity scene, the presents.  For some, the wonderful familiar gospel nativity stories.  So it’s a good time, and I have to be careful that I do not even seem to be critical of good things.  I keep my cool, even at the solemn recital in the supermarket of I Saw Mummy Kissing Santa Claus.

Advent, after all, is hard to describe or sell, particularly to children.  It’s for grown-up people anyway.  Advent is when, with the Jews, we face our yearnings and hopes, and realize yet again what it is like to see through a glass, darkly.  For many there is actually nothing much they can see clearly.  Advent is when we reach out for a word spoken to us which tells us we are known, named, and loved.  It is when, if we don’t actually tear down our idols, we at any rate see them for what they are – and laugh a little bit.  Idols don’t like that very much. 

In the stillness and silence of our prayer Advent may enter, even if Christmas is clamouring all around us everywhere else.  So perhaps that is Advent at its best, in silence, mindfulness and attention.