The meaning of Advent
A turning
Advent is a time of watchfulness. Of preparing the way for an arrival. We put up sparkly Christmas decorations and lights that glitter in the darkness. We erect scenes of adoration on front lawns, as though expecting a welcome visitor – a sort of inverted Passover. My step daughter was inspired to get an inflatable penguin, illuminated from within and kept plump by a motor, its quiet humming already muffled by a foot of snow. The miracle of the nativity is not defiled by kitsch, but confirmed in the overflow of a child’s delight.
These preparations are a turning of one’s attention: a turning-away and a turning-toward. The literal meaning of repentance is turning away (from sin). I was reminded of this in the sermon of a lay member of my congregation, St. Margaret’s Anglican Church in Winnipeg, on the first Sunday of Advent. It was a propitious message, arriving just as I was enmeshed in one of those minor domestic struggles that I suppose are not uncommon between, say, a fourteen year old girl who is still uncertain of her new stepfather (who is usually two thousand miles away) and a stepfather who is still uncertain of his role, wondering how to be a good man with spirited girls unaccustomed to the presence of a father. Was it an unloving interloper or a father, a proper father, that appeared before her as I stood in the kitchen, annoyed with her? I can see now that it was the former. At the time, what I saw was her creating pointless drama and delay as we were trying to get out of the house, to church on time. I felt trespassed against.
On the drive to church, I bristled with an internal monologue of criticism. But Christmas is the season of gift-giving. As this Advent season has progressed, I have learned that the turning-away that is required of me is a turning from pride, the mother of all sin. I think the key is right there in the Lord’s Prayer: “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Pride locks us into our own perspective. It is a failure of generosity.
Christianity places forgiveness at the very center of man’s relationship to God, as an unmerited gift. Taken to heart, this can’t help but color our dealings with one another. The thing about forgiveness is that it is always unmerited. It is a renunciation on the part of the one who offers it, a turning-away from pride that opens a kind of manger in the heart. It is a humble place where something new arrives and we turn toward it. A birth.
There is no room at the inn. The inn is a place where your credit card is kept on file for incidentals: for moments of weakness at the minibar that are sure to occur. Justice requires a strict accounting – above all, keeping the receipts for other people’s trespasses against you.
In the season of Advent, we notice a stillness in the air and raise our heads from this business. We turn and become watchful. There is a star rising in the east.
I remember one Christmas Eve service when we sang a hymn that had a line in it, tucked in somewhere around verse three, about "children who are quiet and obey." I was in a pew next to Kurt and Erika (parents of three), and without looking up from our hymnals, all three of us snickered. We weren't the only ones! What wishful thinking on the part of the composer for a Christmas miracle!
It isn't just the extra sugar and the late nights around Christmas that can make kids awful, it is somehow the expectation around the big day itself: am I getting the right presents? is sister getting better presents than me? what if my friends all get more? Pretty ugly stuff. But in contrast with expectation is anticipation, the waiting. Somehow anticipation brings out the good. The waiting, the hoping. Advent is a time of waiting and repentance, almost a second Lent. Maybe the fact that parents rely heavily on invoking Santa's "naughty list" in their efforts to get kids to stop being such little brats is entirely in keeping with the spirit of advent, and with its focus on our own transgressions and the need for repentance.
The Christmas Eve service ended, as it always does, with the children clothed in white choir robes, each one holding a candle and singing Silent Night, unaccompanied. No more laughing. There wasn't a dry eye in the sanctuary. The children took to the song in the serious way of children. In the still of the church each parent could, if you listened, distinguish the voice of her or his own child. What a gift, is a child -- even when they are little terrors and petty tyrants. A good reminder that we can be terrors, too, and tyrants, petty or otherwise. But we are gifts to the Father, and His love is such that instead of putting us where we deserve, squarely on the naughty list, he gave us the biggest gift: a baby soft and small, lying in a manger.
We cannot wait for you and your girls to be here at Christmas, Matthew!
As ever, thank you for the great post. I like how attention is expressed through the turning away / toward during Advent. As I grow older I find Christmas is an important time to feel a deep, focused sense of gratitude for all that I have. It is a gratitude that emerges through the time I spend with family and friends.
I've been inspired my Matthew's writing for years now and found myself this morning in flurry of thoughts, ideas and feelings. I wanted to share them here by way of thanks to Matthew for so much I've learned from his insightful writing, and to offer them to others here who I imagine share similar interests on life and being in the world. Excuse the grandioseness of what I've written. A night of techno will often mark me the next day with a refreshing, peaceful sense of openness. These are opportunities we must seize upon before they drift away!
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Being led out of yourself and into the world: Morning thoughts on the way back down
"Humans are social animals, and rituals, ecstatic or otherwise, could be an expression of this sociality, a way of renewing the bonds that held a community together."
• Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy by Barbara Ehrenreich
My ears are still ringing from yesterday’s day of dancing. A bad idea for someone who works in sound, but an indication of a deeply absorbing quality of experience. A tight and intense 7-hours of hard techno followed by the blissful lost-in-a-sea-of-bodies sublimity of the larger room.
There is something deeply nourishing, restorative even, of finding myself lost in the company of so many strangers, young and old, bumping up against one another as we navigate our way, each immersed in one’s own private cosmic journey, and yet equally and simultaneously feeding back into the collective mood and energy of the space; individuals contributing to something bigger than themselves. Perhaps the collective effervescence of these rituals acts as a kind of primordial reminder: You are so small; the bodies of people around you, their lives, the wider world and the universe so great.
No man is an island,
Entire of itself;
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
• No Man Is an Island by John Donne
Is this the ultimate meaning underpinning all human life? My physical body suggests a strict boundary between me and the world, the self and the other, the tool or instrument I hold in my hand. My personal psychological apparatus - the way I think and feel and remember and tell myself stories about who I think I am - seemlessly creates the feeling that I am an individual self, existing at the centre of experience. And yet, despite this feeling of how I live my life or because of it, there is some great timeless, human urge existing deep down in all of us. That urge, that drive, is to reach out beyond ourselves. To lose our minds, or rather, to reach out into the vastness of the world, beyond ourselves.
Is this the definition of love?
Is love the deepest, truest, most natural gesture that transcends the atomised self, the fragile fortification of the ego? Does love allow us to transport ourselves out into the world and to feel that fundamental truth: Look at the stars at night. You are so small and everything so vast.
Love. The freedom we so desperately seek, and yet remain so stubbornly confused by.
"In a culture predicated on this autonomy-heteronomy distinction, it is difficult to think clearly about attention—the faculty that joins us to the world—because everything located outside your head is regarded as a potential source of unfreedom, and therefore a threat to the self."
• The World Beyond Your Head by Matthew Crawford
Where do we find freedom? In all acts of love and generosity and passion and care. Love towards the other, towards family, children, friends, community, clubs, shared domains of cultural practices, traditions and interest groups, to societies, nations, the environment, all animals, all the world, to the ground of being. All things shining. Somewhere here our conceptual apparatus that defines subject-object, self-other begins to fall away.
And yet we know that this moving-out-of-oneself and into the whole can contain the threat of a darker, simpler force. History teaches us this. A force that can propagate polarisation, tribalism, racism, in-groups / out-groups, us and them, fear and hatred of the other.
"This great evil, where's it come from? How'd it steal into the world? What seed, what root did it grow from? Who's doing this? Who's killing us, robbing us of life and light, mocking us with the sight of what we might've known? Does our ruin benefit the earth, does it help the grass to grow, the sun to shine? Is this darkness in you, too? Have you passed through this night?"
"They want you dead, or in their lie. Only one thing a man can do - find something that's his, and make an island for himself."
• The Thin Red Line (1998) dir. Terrence Malick
To avoid the trap! No man is an island, entire of itself, for it runs contrary to our very nature. As human beings with the very real feeling of individual lives, it remains our challenge, our endless task, to ceaselessly work towards the expansion, extension and transcendence of that very sense of self.
In reaching out in loving kindness, to listen and offer up to the other, one relaxes the habitual contortions of the self. In doing so we open up the possibility that we may be transformed, becoming more than we ever imagined we could.
"Waking up to who you are requires letting go of who you imagine yourself to be."
• Alan Watts
If we look closely at lived experience we can discover that our moments of true flourishing, of deep meaning, joy and love, emerge out of that space of the moment where our very sense of self dissipates in the vastness of experience.