In liturgical Christian traditions, the Advent season encompasses the four Sundays leading up to
Christmas. Historically, the church waited to celebrate Jesus’s birth until Christmas Day, which
began a twelve-day feast on the church calendar. Advent has long been a time of expectant joy
amidst uncertainty, a season of blessed waiting in lament and hope. To people like me, who did
not grow up in liturgical traditions, this feels strange. Growing up, we celebrated “the Christmas
season” from Black Friday through Christmas Day. Come December 26, it was all over, and we
began preparations for New Year’s Day. We followed the cultural rhythm and thought nothing
odd about it. The cultural rhythm has not changed much since I was a kid. We still live in a time
and place where “delayed gratification” approaches oxymoron. There is no joy in waiting. We
have streaming services, e-books, and Super-Ultra-Lightspeed priority shipping. Whatever the
streaming services don’t have, at least one person in your friend group can help you find on
websites that stake their domain under the Jolly Roger. In our time and place, a season of
introspection, expectation, and even lamentation before Christmas Day seems almost perverse.
And yet, I would suggest to you that a time of intentional meditation on ourselves and our world
before celebrating Christmas is a blessing.
Throughout most of the year, our fast-paced world demands that we react to breaking news story
after breaking news story with a mixture of rage, fear, sorrow, and breathless disbelief. The
Christmas season only adds to our list of expected behaviors. News networks continue to publish
tragedies, social media influencers continue to rage-bait, and politicians continue to argue loudly
though now you will occasionally hear “I cannot believe so-and-so would do such-and-such
during Christmas!” Add to this the emotional and physical volatility that accompanies a seasonal
high-sugar diet, and it is no wonder that we find ourselves caught in an ever-heightening
whirlwind of emotion. How can a human person sustain such a tumultuous rout of rage, hope,
generosity, joy, and rapacious consumerism? And more worryingly, how can the human person
hope to decide on a cathartic course of action for all these feelings? Most of us have no time to
process because we find ourselves with barely enough time to buy, to sell, to eat, to drink, and to
be merry. At best, we can use the hope, joy, and consumerism to escape for a time from the
stress of the other emotions. But even this leaves us weary, dissatisfied, and wondering whether
it was all worth it as we clear away the discarded wrapping paper.
As usual, we can find some good news and comfort in a Yuletide story. In A Christmas Carol,
Charles Dickens tells the redemption story of the infamous miser Ebenezer Scrooge. In modern
summaries of A Christmas Carol, we are told that Scrooge changed because he chose to be
merry and generous all year long. But these retellings miss a key feature of the story. Scrooge
was not taught to be merry first; he was forced to wait and in that waiting to see: to see himself
as he truly was, to see the truth of the world around him, and to consider the destinations of his
life and world “if these shadows remain unaltered by the future” (Dickens, A Christmas Carol).
From this waiting and seeing, he began to understand how he could live life well. From this
understanding, he learned to eat, drink, be merry, and yes even buy and sell, well all the year
round.
We, like Scrooge, need time to see and to understand. Disciplined waiting blesses us with this
time. Tish Harrison Warren puts it this way, “We need collective space, as a society, to grieve—
to look long and hard at what is cracked and fractured in our world and in our lives.” (Warren,
Advent) The spirits in Dickens’s novel might have been able to do it all in one night, but most of
us will need more time than that. Happily, the Christian tradition not only provides a season for
this kind of reflection at Advent but also contains a vital discipline for it: meditation.
Dr. James Earl Massey once wrote that the spiritual practice of meditation “is the act of letting
the mind take its place before God and his creation…with a spirit of humble receptiveness”
(Massey, Spiritual Disciplines). When we meditate, we discipline ourselves to stop and apply our
minds and hearts to consider something important. In the Advent Season, as Warren said, that
often means our own spiritual condition, the state of our world, our longing for Christ’s return,
and what we should be doing in the meantime (Warren, Advent). This kind of meditation,
though, requires time and silence.
Waiting and reflecting during Advent blesses us with four weeks to feel and to think deeply. We
must discipline ourselves to use it, to take time away from the rush and bustle and to reflect.
Similarly, we must discipline ourselves to seek out silence. Dr. Massey said, “Silence helps us
see…what problems speak with the loudest voice, which strivings are most insistent within our
lives” (Massey, Spiritual Disciplines). Within this silence we find what Dr. Massey called “the
soul’s ache for God,” that is, “a rupture between life as we know it and life as it should be.”
Warren mirrors this for Advent, “To practice Advent is to lean into an almost cosmic ache: our
deep, wordless desire for things to be made right and the incompleteness we find in the
meantime” (Warren, Advent). We must deliberately carve out time be quiet and listen, to stop
running around and see where we and our world ache for their Creator.
This, in many ways, is a good summary of the Christian life: one long discipline of waiting for
Christ’s return. And we, like Scrooge, must evaluate the ways in which we wait all year long. In
the parables of the Ten Virgins (Matt. 25:1-13) and the Talents (Matt. 25:14-30), Jesus showed
us that Christians should wait actively. In both parables, what the characters do while they wait
provides the central tension of the story. Advent blesses us with the opportunity to pause and
ponder the character and content our waiting. Do we wait well? Do we wait upon the right
things? What should we now be grieving that we are not? What should we now be doing that we
are not? Do we do all things to the glory of Christ?
Will Jesus find us laboring as he instructed us to labor until he returns? Will he find us succoring
the poor, the orphaned, the widow, the foreigner, and the oppressed in the name of mythological
human progress or in the name of Jesus who made them his image-bearers? Will he find us
rejoicing in righteousness and calling people to repentance and faith in Jesus in the hollow name
of insipid Christian values or in the name of Jesus, the one “who will save His people from their
sins” (Matt. 1:21)? Will he find us willing to lose the culture war with a smile on our faces and
songs in our hearts because, like a parent who ends conflict between two squabbling children, the
Sovereign King has declared the end of worldly strife and the reign of “peace on earth” and
“good will towards men on whom His favor rests” (Luke 2:14), or will he find us taking up the
sword against our neighbors in the name of our rights and our comforts in spite of the Sovereign
King’s words? As we ask these questions, we can take heart that others before us have needed to
ask and answer questions just like these, and we can still learn much from their successes and
their failures.
Our Bibles are littered with examples of faithful members of God’s people who waited just as we
do. I think of David, refusing to kill Saul as he trusted that God would establish his kingship
without regicide (1 Sam. 24). I think of Ruth and Naomi who waited for God’s deliverance from
poverty and ruin (Ruth 2:20-4:12). I think of Anna the Prophetess and Simeon who waited to see
the Lord’s Salvation (Luke 2:25-38). I think of Mary, waiting almost 34 years for people to see
that her son was sent from God (John 2:1-12). I think of Jesus, waiting in the Garden (Matt.
26:36-46) and waiting for hours on the Cross until he could say “It is finished” (John 19:1-30). I
think of the closing words of John’s letter to the churches in Asia, who were waiting, even as we
continue to wait today, for the Second Coming of Jesus (Rev. 22). This is not a comfortable
process, but God has imbued it with a blessed hope. Dr. Massey reminds us, “God has no greater
joy than that of healing a person’s inward ache for him” (Massey, Spiritual Disciplines).
Waiting and reflecting during Advent also grows within us a deeper joy. Let me add a final note
of encouragement and a final note of warning. To encourage you, I promise that meditation on
the true state of the world and on ourselves will not dampen the joy of Christmas. As Gandalf
and Frodo sat in Minas Tirith after the destruction of a great evil in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Return of
the King, Frodo was eager to go home. But Gandalf told him to wait. When Frodo asked him
what they were waiting for, all Gandalf would say was, “Many folk like to know beforehand
what is to be set on the table; but those who have laboured to prepare the feast like to keep their
secret; for wonder makes the words of praise louder” (Tolkien, The Return of the King). And in
the end, the replanting of the Tree of the King, the coronation of Aragorn, the wedding of
Aragorn and Arwen, and his own journey homeward with the King and Queen at his side were
indeed more joyous for the waiting. So it can also be with Christmas – disciplined meditation and
blessed waiting will only deepen the joy of our Christmas celebration.
Finally, let me add a note of warning. If you reclaim disciplined meditation and blessed waiting
in Advent, you will seem odd to your unbelieving friends and maybe even some of your
Christian friends. Your mood will appear unfit for a season of raucous consumption and
stipulated celebration. You will appear more of Nienna than of Bacchus. But insofar as your
reflection and lament are incongruous with the season, the depth and breadth of your joy will be
incomprehensible to the world. You will reject the vapid, fragile joy of escapism and cultivate
the sincere, defiant joy of palpable hope. Warren tells us that only after such deliberation “can
celebration become deep, rich, and resonant, not as a saccharine act of delusion but as a defiant
act of hope” (Warren, Advent). When others turn away in fear or despair, you will look evil full
in the face and weep for its harms, but you will declare by your joy that even such great evils are
but small and passing things and that “there is light and high beauty” forever beyond their reach
(Tolkien, Return of the King). You will sing and believe, “God is not dead nor does it sleep; the
wrong shall fail, the right prevail with peace on earth, good will to men.” You will know how to
keep Christmas well, even if you do not keep it as others do.
Works Cited
Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol.
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Return of the King
Tish Harrison Warren, “Want to Get into the Christmas Spirit? Face the Darkness: How I Fell in
Love with the Season of Advent,” The New York Times (Nov. 30, 2019).
James Earl Massey, Spiritual Disciplines: A Believer’s Openings to the Grace of God.
