WHEN I worked at a university, Covid restrictions meant that we weren’t permitted to take a seat close to 1 one other for the school photo. Instead, a drone was brought in. As we stood there, impressively socially distanced, it took off with such noise and wind force that we looked just like the opening sequence of Father Ted with everyone struggling to remain upright.
The hardest part was smiling for the photograph. The drone took its time, and most of us were perhaps replicating the disciples on Ascension Day, looking up with blinking faces. One of my don colleagues got a bit frustrated: “Hurry up, you bloody thing!” he swore, waving his fist on the sky. “I’m losing my sincerity.”
AS THE weeks of Advent draw to an in depth, “Hurry up! I’m losing my sincerity” is perhaps the prayer in lots of hearts, and never just those of the clergy who’ve sat through too many carol services. Advent is the season that demands of us an unusual degree of self-recognition and honesty, and a few sincerity with God, as we acknowledge that we aren’t, in spite of everything, complete inside ourselves. Contrary to numerous self-help therapy, the reality is that human beings may be made whole only from outside of themselves. A human life is complete after we know we aren’t alone, and after we are loved beyond our belief or sense of value.
Advent is, due to this fact, also the season of the Church’s 12 months that’s voiced within the vocative — crying out, reaching out, searching for help. You hear it within the “O”s of Advent. Their prayer is a cry at midnight: “O God, O Key to my life, O Saviour of my imperfection: come, come to us, come and judge us, tell us who we’re, who we now have turn into, so we are able to all admit it and look to be modified.
“Make us alert so we are able to stand before you, spiritually naked, ready now to be clothed by something warmer. We are fractured: come and make us integrated. We are injured: come and soothe. We are cruel, selfish monsters: so come and challenge us. We are distracted and never distilled: come and repair. We are human, make us humane. Come and tell us your guarantees again in order that we are able to turn into more promising, because without you, we’re our own worst enemies, and can destroy the things we love: our communities and churches, our family members, our currency of trust, our deepest selves, and even the planet you gifted us.”
“We don’t fear you because you’re frightening,” prays Advent, “but because you’re real, and we, a lot of the time, aren’t, because we’re proudly hiding. It is barely by exposing our lives of messy straw that we make ourselves ready so that you can be laid there: the primary glimpse of Love, the one who throws light into my darkness.”
ADVENT is a brief season. It seems to know that we cannot sustain this honesty for long. We feel too vulnerable and exposed. We will need one other round of self-scrutiny when Lent comes along. When I worked in Denmark, I once went to a seminar on geo-politics led by an eminent diplomat from the Middle East. Someone asked about Britain’s attitude to regardless of the topic was we were discussing. “Ah, the British,” the diplomat said. “Well, they wish to say the sun never sets on their empire. But that is barely because God doesn’t trust them at midnight.”
In the times of Advent, we enter into the darkness solid by our own shadows, and we pray that God will have the opportunity to trust us as we try to remain authentic, transparent, and open to the vital amendments in our lives that the gospel joyfully demands of us. Today, there may be a lot distraction and pressure to pursue the enviable life relatively than the great life that God might well see us wobble and slip back into our old templates for living. We know that a proud humanity may be saved only by a humble God, but — please — hurry up! We are losing our sincerity.
THE human encounter with truth in Advent’s prayers and carols is just like the experience of being shipwrecked: tossed out of vessels we’ve settled into and been comfortable to be a passenger in for some time; finding ourselves in latest, unexplored places which will feel sad, dangerous, or just uninhabitable.
The image we reach for to explore these Advent ruptures in our hearts and behaviours is perhaps the beachcomber, drifting somewhere between the oceanic depths of God and the richness and adventure of life as gift, and the rocky realities of life ashore — perhaps in a jungle, or on a clifftop, often lonely, where we pitch ourselves precariously and with a vulnerability that’s unnerving.
As Advent night gives option to Christmas dawn, there may be enough light to see that the coastline runs between mystery and mayhem, or, in Thomas Hardy’s words, between “the wonder and the wormwood of the entire”. Ours could be the language of the shipwrecked, but that doesn’t mean that we’re hopeless — quite the alternative. One now involves pitch his tent with us, constructing a latest dwelling on our island; drawing us so near to him that together we imagine a kingdom — a kingdom of God, even; inviting us to see the horizons of possibility.
THERE is a difference between losing things and getting lost. Losing things involves a falling away of stuff we now have amassed and of masks that now not work. Getting lost opens the option to a discovery of the brand new and the as yet unexperienced. It happens when God moves in next to us and unsettles our settlements.
Incarnation asks us to not lose sight of what Advent revealed to us of ourselves, and tasks us with finding the desire and the energy to like in a world freshly comprehended and graced.
To live and pray with the language of the shipwrecked is difficult but, as we see in Advent, and as Shakespeare shows us in The Tempest, sometimes the language of the shipwrecked is probably the most beautiful and compelling of all. We must first acknowledge the “darkness [that is] mine”; but then, in the sunshine that involves dispel it, we see the gorgeous reality that “What’s past is prologue.”
The Very Revd Dr Mark Oakley is the Dean of Southwark, and Whitelands Professorial Fellow at Roehampton University.
