An Introduction to this year’s themes:
The Christian religion traditionally places an emphasis on the virtue of waiting with patience and hope and dedicates an entire month of its calendar to pursuit of that virtue. “Have patience ... wait for the Lord ... wait with hope,” the scriptures urge us. But when we witness the words of Christ in the texts, he embodies an immediacy - the kingdom of God is near! It’s within you! - that contradicts our churchy teachings on waiting and the traditional and Psalmic norms. A paradox.
Each year in Advent, I try to come to the season with fresh perspective, looking for something I haven’t seen before. But the truth is, I get bored by the same old Advent themes. Hope, peace, joy, love - every year the same. The boredom makes sense: Advent is a season created for waiting and waiting is often boring.
Like other worthy spiritual pursuits such as grief, shadow/ego work, lament, repentance; waiting is one we would mostly rather avoid. It feels pointless until it isn’t. And every year the wait feels longer. Not the wait for Christmas, psssht ... the wait for a better world, for the things Jesus spoke of to become our lived reality. And every year our griefs pile up.
This year I’m contemplating the boredom I personally feel toward a church ritual that can sometimes ring hollow … You know, what with murderers routinely getting off scot-free, climate emergency breathing down our necks, the deep grief of the pandemic and all the loss of life it has caused, ongoing hate and division that feels insurmountable, ongoing racial injustice and oppression, plus a million other deeply discouraging problems - given all this, having hope/peace/joy/love feels like a denial of reality. It feels less like subversion and more like insanity.
And I’m thinking about the grief so many of us feel, the grief road we walk daily. The stages of grief: Denial -> Anger -> Bargaining -> Depression -> Acceptance.
We who follow the Christ are invited onto a path of paradox, to live into many contradictions: contradictions between what we see and what we hope for, but also that contradiction between the tradition’s emphasis on waiting for “someday” and Christ’s insistence that someday is now; the tradition telling us we are waiting for a “savior” and Christ telling us that we are “it” alongside him (“greater things than these” he says we’ll do, and so forth).
How can we, in the same season, the same moment even, be present to both grief and joy, both longing and gratitude, both lament and hope? I don’t have any satisfying answers to this question. But I know I want to find them. I want to get better at living peacefully inside those tensions. And I want to be aware enough of the world around me to do at least some good here. With all this in my mind, I’m creating this year’s Advent series with a robust acknowledgement of these tensions and the paradoxes in which we live a life of faith. I’m facing the stages of grief* - denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, and depression, culminating in acceptance - head on; right alongside the traditional virtues celebrated each week during Advent: hope, peace, joy, and love, culminating in what we perceive as the Gift - God With Us.
I’m using this framework in part to state the obvious: life is a mixed bag. And in part to offer a prayerful start to doing the hard work of keeping faith in the midst of the messy mixed bag, the tension of which takes some emotional maturity to keep company with.
If this is more complexity than you bargained for (lol), no worries; go check out my litanies from 2018, where I take a more simple approach.
Advent 1 (Year B, 2021): Denial and Hope
A note on denial
No stage of the grief process is bad. Each serves its purpose. In the context of grief, Dr. Ross and Dr. Kessler note that the denial stage serves as a necessary survival strategy in the midst of shock and loss, allowing the person’s body and mind time to catch up with the new reality.
I think this also applies to our denial of problems in life - sometimes we need a little time to wrap our heads around things. But trouble starts when we stay in denial and numb ourselves to pain and decline to do anything to help. Trouble also starts when we allow pie-in-the-sky religious hope to insulate us from reality, which I judge to be bad/unhelpful behavior and I think we are reaping the rewards of that now in many areas, as anyone who is paying attention to the problems plaguing the US Church of late can observe. I suspect you Canadian and overseas friends can attest as well.
All that said, here is my litany for week 1 of Advent 2021. It feels like now is not the time for platitudes; so I’m going right in here.
God, we find ourselves with the challenge of living hopefully in a world full of pain.
We have seen how religious hope can become a toxic thing
That numbs us to reality,
Suppresses expressions of grief,
And declines to do anything to create change.
This denial is not what we want to practice …