What is Advent?
“Advent is a place to park our feelings. It’s a placeholder for noticing both the light and dark in our lives.” Lacy Finn Borgo
“The disappointment, brokenness, suffering, and pain that characterize life in this present world is held in dynamic tension with the promise of future glory that is yet to come. In that Advent tension, the church lives its life.” Fleming Rutledge
“One of the essential paradoxes of Advent: that while we wait for God, we are with God all along, that while we need to be reassured of God’s arrival, or the arrival of our homecoming, we are already at home. While we wait, we have to trust, to have faith, but it is God’s grace that gives us that faith. As with all spiritual knowledge, two things are true, and equally true, at once. The mind can’t grasp paradox; it is the knowledge of the soul.” Michelle Blake
I haven’t had a consistent Advent practice until the last few years. Maybe you’re the same? (A small primer on Advent: Since about the 5th century the Church has been “practicing” Advent, marking the four Sundays before Christmas as days of preparation for the Messiah’s arrival.) Advent is to Christmas what Lent is to Easter. We connect to the rhythms of Jesus’ life. This Sunday is the first Sunday of Advent 2020.
Advent is a “liminal season” in which the Church, in preparation for the Second Advent of Christ, lives out the expectation of the First Advent of Christ. “Liminal” comes from the word for threshold. We stand at the dawn of something new. Not in the past, but not yet in the future either. Consider standing at the threshold of a doorway: Waiting betwixt and between. And like all waiting, it can be difficult, really difficult.
Other liminal spaces in Scripture include the desert, the wilderness, the belly of the whale, between Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday. Again, betwixt and between. For those of you who have birthed babies (or helped in the process), you know this liminal space as “transition” when you’re exhausted, helpless, and hopeless. I remember my sister pointlessly declaring at this moment in her delivery, “I’ve changed my mind. This is too painful. I’m going home.”
With Advent, we can acknowledge these feelings of exhaustion, helplessness, and hopelessness all the while learning to wait on the Lord’s deliverance.
We have the opportunity this Advent to practice waiting yet again. “The Advent mystery is then a mystery of emptiness, of poverty, of limitation. It must be so. Otherwise, it would not be a mystery of hope,” says Thomas Merton.
Hope is the fruit of waiting. And the Scriptures say that waiting is not fruitless, ". . . waiting does not diminish us, any more than waiting diminishes a pregnant mother. We are enlarged in the waiting. We, of course, don’t see what is enlarging us. But the longer we wait, the larger we become, and the more joyful our expectancy” Romans 8:24, 25, The Message.
Waiting, when it has its way, can lead to joy. It can lead to hope for our weary souls. It can enlarge our capacity for Jesus. Consider what you’re waiting for this Advent season: to hug a loved one, for physical or emotional healing, for clarity in your role. No matter the reason for your threshold season, you can be sure that God will birth something good, beginning with hope.
Consider these Reflection Questions:
Where might you be feeling exhausted, helpless, and hopeless?
Where in your life are you saying, “I changed my mind. This is too painful. I’m going home”?
Who can you ask to wait with you?
How can you be more hospitable to people (especially yourself) who are waiting?
JUDY