But for Now, We Wait

Christmas started extra early in my neighborhood this year. Several people took down their Halloween decor and immediately replaced them with Christmas lights. We’re so starved for festivity this year that we’re shrinking the time between holidays, turning this season into a non-stop occasion for celebration. And let’s be real, there’s probably nothing better to anticipate this year than the end of it. Thankfully, New Year’s Day is this Sunday (November 29)—well, at least according to the Christian calendar. 

The liturgical year, an alternative way of orienting our days, begins with Advent, a four-week season of penitent preparation for the celebration of Christmas. Known as a “Little Lent,” it’s best known for fasting, interior work, and self-reflection. And even though every fiber in our beings wants to skip straight to the Christmas party, Advent requires patience. In a way, all of 2020 feels like Advent, the whole world waiting in expectation for a gift that will make all things new. 

But for now, we wait. 

What’s most fascinating about the season of Advent is its paradox. Despite December bringing the shortest, darkest day of the year, Advent celebrates the coming of light. And while the rest of the world is caught up in the hustle and bustle of buying and consuming, Advent is an invitation to wait, to sit in defiant expectation of a new normal. It is living in this present darkness with the light of hope. It’s the sudden hush in a theater when the lights dim, the pounding in your chest as you lean forward for your first kiss. Something is about to happen. 

“Advent, more than any other time in the Church year, invites us to embrace the spiritual discipline of waiting,” explains author Holly W. Whitcomb. In a way, life itself is Advent—that is, learning to live as a patient people in an impatient world. So this year in particular, as much as I’d like to join my neighbors in ushering in the Christmas season a bit early, I am learning to wait in the darkness for Christ to come and make all things new. May you find the following prayer by Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann as helpful as I have for entering into this beautiful season. 

A Prayer

In our secret yearnings
we wait for your coming,
and in our grinding despair
we doubt that you will.
And in this privileged place
we are surrounded by witnesses who yearn more than do we
and by those who despair more deeply than do we.
Look upon your church and its pastors
in this season of hope
which runs so quickly to fatigue
and in this season of yearning
which becomes so easily quarrelsome.
Give us the grace and the impatience
to wait for your coming to the bottom of our toes,
to the edges of our fingertips.
We do not want our several worlds to end.
Come in your power
and come in your weakness
in any case
and make all things new.
Amen.

(From Awed to Heaven, Rooted in Earth)

NOTE: This was originally published in our bi-weekly e-newsletter, Liminal Spaces. To get future issues delivered to your inbox, sign up here.

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