Why We Don't Love Advent

Advent is only a couple of weeks away, and I want to begin my polished remarks to prepare us for the holy. The purpose here is to a) understand Advent, and b) long understandingly.

This is my fair warning that the things to come pertain to the calendar. At this point, if you have been a long-time supporter, you may pull your $40 a year and support a Puritan substack that appreciates the cross during Christmas and the tomb during Trinity Sunday. If Advent/Christmas/Epiphany monologues bother you, I would urge you to hit pause and return after January 6th. By then, I will have everything off my chest, including the wreath, Isaac Watts, and nursing home carols.

Nevertheless, dear friend, if you appreciate these timely meanderings, I urge you to stick around and cheer me on in my endeavors. I will try to make your reading worthwhile while irritating certain blocks of hermeneuticians. I don’t have the guts to do No Quarter November, but I do have the guts to work through my November quarters.

You’ve been warned.

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No Longer Longing

No one likes to long for things. No one likes to wait. We are consumerist beings expecting everything to be hand-delivered not one second too late; preferably one second earlier. It’s for these and other reasons that we hate Advent! It’s perhaps for this reason also that we join together Advent and Christmas conceptually. We don’t grasp what Schmemann called the “bright sadness” of this Season, so we would rather incorporate it with a happier season.

From https://unsplash.com/@grantwhitty

But we usually don’t hate Advent intentionally; we hate it emotionally–almost like a visceral reaction. We hate it because words like “longing,” “waiting,” “expecting,” and “hoping” don’t find a comfortable home in our hearts or vocabulary.

Longing to Long

So, I propose we begin the process of un-hating Advent. But we can’t simply un-hate something we have long hated. It takes time to undo our habits. We must try to see Advent for what it really is— a season of practice. It’s a season to warm up our vocal cords for the joys of the world and to strengthen our faith for the adoration of Christ, the Son of the living God.

Few of us treasure the practice time, rehearsal, the conductor’s corrections to our singing, and the coach’s repetitive exercises before the big game. Ultimately, we hate Advent because we don’t like to practice.

Sometimes, however, the solution to stop hating something is to reframe the way you think about that something. Imagine you sit under a tedious professor who reads from his notes with no modulation in his voice. To make matters worse, he rarely, if ever, looks up to engage your eyes but buries himself in his manuscript. While the material is lovely, you long for that intimate connection between the content and the character. The next class comes along, and suddenly, you have an engaging lecturer interested in connecting with you. He will add a couple of funny lines to ensure you are awake. Those professors almost always make a more significant emotional impact than the tedious lecturer.

Longing with Perspective

Advent is like longing for an engaging professor who not only enjoys teaching but looks up to you and seeks to connect with your eyes and heart. If adventing (waiting) were only a process of listening without engaging, it would be a duty without pleasure. But Advent is being guided by someone who looks into the eyes of affliction and speaks from experience.

So, yes, it’s about perspective. To Advent is to wait actively, to long hopefully, and to engage the dynamic prophets who prophesy and proclaim Messiah Jesus.

If we begin to see Advent as an engaging practice for Christmas, our distaste for the season before Christmas will suddenly decrease, and our longing will be more meaningful. Perhaps we won’t hate Advent after all. We will long together with the prophets and those first-century saints who practiced well and embraced Christmas with sounding joy.