I am going back to a simple ABC for this liturgical season. This ABC reminds me that Advent comes Before Christmas. It is not that the liturgical season itself – with its hymns, readings, colors and customs – does not voice this, beautifully. Rather, it is the context of our lived lives that gives my Advent ABC its traction. And yes, I fully expect to hear sermons or see liturgically-attuned posts and memes that encourage me to choose between, on the one hand, the media-driven, market-led pre-Christmas season that is December, and, on the other hand, the much calmer and more somber liturgical season of Advent. But I wonder whether this – somewhat simplistic – choice is all there is. Maybe my Advent ABC can open a slightly different path. Here is how:
I will try to think of the count-down of shopping days until Christmas, and the school and office Christmas or “Holiday” parties before December 24 not as the polar opposite of an Advent spirituality, but as a different (and admittedly rather peculiar, and quite possibly unhealthy) engagement with time. I myself will seek to engage the liturgical time of Advent not simply as an opposite time to inhabit, however – as if we can so easily step out of the daily rhythms and broader ways of belonging that we inhabit culturally. Rather, I will live Advent as an invitation to inhabit more deeply the one God-sustained time each of us has been given. What might this look like? Most importantly, instead of focusing my energies on what to resist, I will journey purposefully through these weeks with an Advent God, a God who is always on the way toward us. Advent, after all, is about God’s own adventus, God’s coming, not our own frantic rush through the days of December. There is, after all, nothing we ourselves can do to manipulate God’s Advent in our lives.
In some ways, the count-down of shopping days left until Christmas is not so dissimilar a journey. Christmas, after all, will surely come this year, no matter how calmly or hurriedly we live these days. The only thing in our hands is the preparing. In the same way, there is something we can do in response to the promise of the presence of God: namely, a particular way of inhabiting time, in anticipation. Some years ago, walking at the shoreline, I realized the kind of waiting and anticipation Advent asked of me. It is a waiting that is sure and centered, like waiting for a tide to turn. I cannot rush the tide or make it move; it is governed by rhythms well beyond my control. Yet in in its own time, the tide will surely come; all I need to do is rest in that assurance. Such waiting is very different from an anxious and fearful anticipation, like one that braces itself for an uncertain answer or a likely “no.”
So in this 2023 Advent season, I wait for God as I would anticipate a coming tide. I want to be there, fully present in joyful expectation, when God’s real presence comes to touch the shores of my life like a vibrant tide. It is the basics of such a waiting I seek to learn again in these Advent days – and whatever help the liturgical season and the cultural obsession with “Christmas” before December 24 ever comes offer me, I will welcome.