For the Advent Curious
Observing the Advent Season Will Deepen Your Christmas Experience.
One of the main benefits of observing Advent is to slow down, pause, and break away from the busyness, stress, and sometimes relentless demand for “cheer,” as well as the commercialization of the holiday season.
As the calendar year winds down, as the days darken and grow short, as Christmas songs spill from crowded stores and children set about making wish lists for Santa, the church’s year dawns. The first day of Advent is our Christian New Year’s Day. It kicks off the entire cycle of the liturgical calendar.
We begin our Christian year in waiting. We do not begin with our own frenetic effort or energy. We do not begin with the merriment of Christmas or the triumph of Easter.. Instead, we begin in a place of yearning. We wait for our king to come.
–Tish Harrison Warren, Advent: The Season of Hope, 3
So, when is Advent? What is Advent? How can observing Advent help you?
When is Advent?
Advent is the beginning of the liturgical year, four weeks before Christmas, and prepares us to appreciate the wonder of Christmas Day and to celebrate the arrival of the Savior. Advent begins this year on Sunday, November 30, and ends on Christmas Eve.
What are liturgies and sacred time?
For Christians, Advent is a season of waiting expectantly (trying to enter imaginatively into the experience of those who lived before Jesus was born).
Liturgies are simply ways of expressing what’s important in tangible, physical ways. Liturgies are not limited to religious life but are everywhere: standing to sing the national anthem and “high-fiving” when our team does well, toasting at weddings, and celebrating with fireworks on the Fourth of July.
Liturgies are ways all people (not just Christians) live in a story.
What is Advent?
The word advent derives from the Latin adventus, which means “coming.” The liturgical season of Advent is the time in which we prepare for and look forward to the coming of Christ.
Christians believe that Christ has already come and brought the kingdom of God. He has already stretched out his hands to heal and to bless. So why do we re-enter a season of waiting each year? What are we waiting for?
Christians believe Christ comes in three ways: in the incarnation (God becoming a man), his future coming in glory to restore and renew creation, and his coming of in our present moment through the Holy Spirit. Advent celebrates and holds together all three comings of Christ. (Tish Harrison Warren, Advent: The Season of Hope, 4)
During Advent, we mark the time when the light of God “shone in the darkness.” And though darkness ultimately will not overpower the light, we still experience the darkness of pain, sorrow, loss, and damaged relationships.
Observing Advent helps us acknowledge the darkness that we honestly feel inside and appreciate the light of the Savior.
It is a time when we pay extra attention to how Christ continues to come and enter the darkest corners of our lives, offering us hope and healing.
It may sound strange, but acknowledging the darkness and overcoming our fear of it is helpful. We discover that joy and grief are often intertwined.
Practicing Advent prepared me to be fully present for two heartbreaking events in 2022 and 2023.
In early December 2022, my mother began to receive hospice care in the living room of her home. Her dying was the focus of our holiday season. My father, brother, sister, and I spent three weeks at her bedside as she slowly slipped away. On December 23, she passed away.
That was the hardest, most painful Christmas I ever experienced. But it was also the most joyful and miraculous. I was able to comfort my mother. I saw that she was precious and valuable even as all her capacities dwindled. I got to know my father in ways I had not before. I told him I loved him for the first time. That was a miracle to me—to overcome such a distance and detachment.
There we were, facing the grimmest reality of all-death. There was no superficiality or distraction. Yet, we had hope, and our love was expressed in words and touch.
In December 2023, my father was in the same living room, near death. I had the chance to comfort him, thank him, and say goodbye. He passed away on January 23, 2024, exactly a year and one month after my mother.
A Time of Waiting
Just as many people in Israel two thousand years ago waited for a savior with longing, Christians today wait for him to come near personally and to come and make things right—to end suffering and disharmony.
The following is an excerpt from Henri Nouwen on the struggle of waiting:
Most people consider waiting a waste of time.
The culture in which we live is basically saying,
“Get going! Do something! Don’t just sit there and wait!”
For many people, waiting is an awful desert between where they are and where they want to go.
A waiting person is someone who is present to the moment,
who believes that this moment is the moment.
A waiting person is a patient person. Patience means the willingness to stay where we are and live the situation out to the full in the belief that something hidden there will manifest itself to us.
Impatient people are always expecting the real thing to happen somewhere else
and therefore want to go elsewhere.
Open-ended waiting is hard for us because we tend to wait for something very specific, filled with wishes: I wish that the weather would be better. I wish that the pain would go.” We are full of wishes, and our waiting easily gets entangled in those wishes. We want the future to go in a very specific direction, and if this does not happen, we are disappointed and can even slip into despair. Here we can see how wishes tend to be connected with fears.
I have found it very important in my own life to let go of my wishes and start hoping. It was only when I was willing to let go of wishes that something really new, something beyond my own expectations, could happen to me.
Just imagine what Mary was actually saying in the words, “I am the handmaid of the Lord, let what you have said be done to me” (Luke 1:38). She was saying, “I don’t know what this all means, but I trust that good things will happen.”
Thanks for reading. Stay tuned for sharings and Advent meditations over the next four weeks.