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Advent is a Time of Hope in the Darkness

I wonder if one reason so many people experience 'holiday blues' is that the culturally dominant holiday calendar is all feasts and no fasts. Even funerals, in the US today, have often been entirely replaced by 'celebrations of life'—an attempt to chase away the sadness, rather than experience it.

Historically, Advent was a season for fasting when Christians might mourn for the broken state of the world and pray for Christ to come quickly to set all things to right. Today, many churches (at least the American Protestant ones with which I'm most familiar) begin singing festive Christmas hymns from the beginning of Advent. With the notable (and excellent) exception of "O Come, O Come Emmanuel" the tone of waiting and praying in the midst of the darkness is mostly absent. But the fact is, the herald angels are not yet singing and there is no peace on earth.

The secular calendar is even more extreme. We've created a winter holiday season stretching all the way from Thanksgiving to New Years for continuous festivity. We've made no space, either at this season or any other, for public sadness, or for being together in sadness. The six weeks of continual jollity is more than many can maintain, especially when it seems like the world is on fire.

I hope everyone who celebrates (on the Western calendar) has a merry Christmas tomorrow. But if you are so not there right now, you might remember the story of a heavily pregnant young woman spending yet another day in the cold, bouncing uncomfortably down the road on the bony back of a donkey, wishing for nothing more than a warm bed, and finding out there won't be one tonight. If you're approaching Christmas like that, you might be the one who is in the true holiday spirit. In Advent, we strive to look through this world's darkness with a stubborn hopefulness. With eyes of flesh, we can see no peace and yet, through the cold and the darkness, God's peace approaches and heaven breaks through into history just where we least expect it. Tomorrow will be time to proclaim joy to the world; today, we continue to hope for that joy in the midst of the darkness.