ADVENT is the season of promise and hope. The two concepts seem at first contradictory. If something is promised, then it is cheap to suppose that you simply don’t have to hope that the promise will likely be kept. Unfortunately, things don’t all the time work out like that. You discover that the one making the promise was to not be trusted in any case.
Advent celebrates absolutely the confidence that Christians have within the fulfilment of God’s essential promise. He guarantees that we are usually not alone. We carry a primal fear of being alone deep in our subconscious. It begins as a toddler’s fear of abandonment: the form of fear experienced once we became momentarily separated from a parent in a busy street or shop. It ends in a fear of aloneness and of abandonment within the moment of death.
GOD has promised himself to us as Immanuel, God with us. But it is tough, sometimes, to see how God will be with us in our primal fear of being alone. All we will do is to hope that he’s. It is straightforward to put in writing off hope as something that is just too vague and nebulous to be taken seriously; so we are inclined to “hope for one of the best” and leave it at that.
But Christian hope is greater than wishful pondering, since it takes us from easy belief into the realm of religion. It stands against that form of lazy indifference. It is alive and energetic. It lays hold of us once we feel helpless, and voiceless, in regard to what we read within the news, to on a regular basis betrayals of trust, and to the lack of integrity and honour among the many powerful, who in no small measure control our lives. Hope surprises us once we least expect it.
As we grow out of childhood, we loosen our grip on certain beliefs, especially with regard to Christmas. If you ever believed in Father Christmas, you retain that belief — if you happen to keep it in any respect — as a form of private eager for times long gone. You don’t expect Christmas to be what it once was. You comprehend it to be a season of mixed blessings, especially if you may have been recently bereaved, or experienced adversity over the past 12 months, or are simply defeated by what is going on on the world stage.
You don’t attempt to make Christmas something that it will not be. So, if the season of Advent is one in every of hope, it must prepare us for Christmas by allowing us first to deepen in hope when faced with the tough realities of today. We do that not by exercising a form of forced and nostalgic optimism in regards to the Christmas season, but by allowing ourselves to know hold of hope from a spot of certainty, and from inside our own hearts.
CERTAINTY will not be something that is well related to Christmas. Other Christmas myths have overlaid the concept of certainty, reducing hope to childish sentiment and to a general spirit of bonhomie. Those feelings are hard to sustain at one of the best of times — partly in consequence of the sheer physical exhaustion involved in making a standard Christmas occur because it has all the time happened, in anyone family or context, compounded by anxieties regarding all the things from money and relationships as to if we’re going to have the option to administer our own long-term depression throughout the few days of enforced festivities that lie ahead. Advent generally is a time of great anxiety if we don’t lay hold of Christian hope.
Hope doesn’t banish anxieties, but it surely transcends them. For this to be possible, hope must be made real in such a way that an individual is totally certain that what they’re holding to is hope and never mere optimism. We lay hold of hope — and of the knowledge that comes with it — by first being reminded of what it’s that we each hope for and have already got: Immanuel, God with us, within the “now” and within the “not yet”.
Advent is a season of “the now and the not yet”; of realised eschatology brought home to us through a form of robust determination to face down the sentimental myths of Christmas with the realities of now, before we put up the cards or decorate the tree.
This facing down of outworn sentiment can require a combination of empathy and courage. We have to know easy methods to engender something like Christian joy when people around us are going through difficult times, or just don’t have the emotional or other resources needed to make the fact of Christmas true for themselves.
JOY will not be similar to cheerfulness. We also need courage: a courage that comes with a knowing that takes us beyond belief. It is a courage that we stock inside us. We should own it and lay hold of it with confidence. With courage, we will face down the unnameable fears that we stock inside us regarding the state of the planet and the politics of the day. We name this courage and the knowing that it brings as hope.
This is the knowing that the prophet Job spoke of: “I do know that my redeemer lives.” He didn’t simply consider. He knew. We don’t pretend, either to ourselves or to anyone else, that we “know” this truth epistemologically (simply as a truth that is restricted by finite knowledge or provability), but that the knowledge that we’ve got is a special form of knowing, and already lies inside our hearts.
We know because, just like the shepherds and the magi, we’re drawn — even compelled — to like and worship what’s holy about Christmas, despite the fact that Christmas has not officially begun, despite the road decorations which have been up since mid-October. We allow the holy to emerge from the tinsel and glitter, from the canned music within the shops, from the anxiety and stress of the approaching season, from the “not yet”.
We call this “allowing” prayer.
The Revd Dr Lorraine Cavanagh is an writer, and a priest within the Church in Wales.
