What are we waiting for?

Around here, cut your own tree farms often close up shop for the season by the second week of December. Demand is high. So are the prices. We’ve learned our lesson over the years. If you want a shapely tree you have to be first in line. This year, I had the bright idea to tag a tree the first Sunday after Thanksgiving and come back for it in December. It only took one tour of the farm to pick the perfect tree. Gathered around our fragrant find, I pulled the bright orange streamers and name card I’d been handed as we came in, ready to claim our holiday centerpiece. 

And then the protests began.

“Let’s just get it now,” opined one kid. 

“Yeah, Mom. Why wait?” 

Mark shrugged. "Then we don't have to make another trip." He stood there holding the saw K had sneakily grabbed off the rack near the holiday shed, while I was inside collecting our tagging tools.

I was immediately outnumbered by enthusiastic pleas and a hyper dog straining at his leash. That tree never did sport a fluorescent streamer. Instead, it found itself on the top of our blue jalopy headed straight for our living room. Why wait?

Advent has always been one of my favorite seasons. Growing up, some kids thrilled preparing for Santa’s arrival, making lists, writing letters, trying to be extra good. That was fun, but what I really loved were the visual contrasts of short days, dark nights, and candles lit in a small white New England chapel. I didn’t really know much about Advent as a part of the larger liturgical calendar. I couldn’t have told you anything about its connections to other parts of the church year, like Easter; instead, Advent appealed to something far more tangible—light in the dark, warmth in the cold, hope for an upside-down world, and of course, childhood anticipation. These were things I understood.

Modern day observances of Advent tend to focus on Christ’s first coming. We light candles, sing songs, and read scripture passages that all focus on the first incarnation. But in the Middle Ages, the season of Advent had a double focus. The word adventus is a Latin translation of the Greek word parousia, used to refer to both the first and second coming of Christ. For the first two weeks of Advent, the early church focused on Christ’s second coming in a posture of both repentance and hope; only the second two weeks were focused on the babe in a manger.

What if we reconnected to Advent’s roots? What if our preparing was of a different nature? Sure, we spend a lot time preparing for Christmas in our culture. But most of those preparations are physical ones—we set up trees, we bake cookies, we sing songs, we gather with family and friends, we shop for gifts for loved ones to remember the gift of Christ. For as much as I love all these traditions, they also often leave me feeling depleted by the end of the holiday season. Any household manager can attest that the leap from all the activity of Thanksgiving into the activity of Christmas is a daunting one, no matter how many times they’ve done it. But if Advent were less about physical preparation designed to conjure nostalgia for the past and were more about spiritual preparation designed for the hope of Christ’s second coming, how might we approach this season?

I love the idea of devoting the first two weeks of advent to more contemplative practices that prepare us for what is yet to be. Perhaps our traditions would start with quieting our hearts, with silence, with prayer and scripture. Perhaps we’d allow ourselves to sit still, maybe even in the dark, before lighting up the night with candles and trees and outdoor light displays.

Just this week, our family’s plans for the season came to a screeching halt when our son became a close contact and then tested positive for Covid. We spent the first two days making phone calls, figuring out at home learning, changing family plans, canceling appointments, and looking for substitutes for both our volunteer obligations and jobs. The work of that is still in process, as more of us experience breakthrough cases. 

I realized Saturday morning as I watched K wrapped in a blanket paging through our pile of Christmas picture books, that we’re not creatures who shift course quickly or easily. Normally, we would have been zooming about getting ready for speech and basketball, tossing a bagel his way and zipping him out the door. My first emotion when I woke was disappointment that he would be missing both his favorite activities and his therapies for the next week. Yet, to see him still on a Saturday morning, snuggled by the dog and the Christmas tree, I wondered if maybe my perception of what we were missing was a bit skewed. Sure, he’ll miss the fun of basketball, and he’ll likely get behind in his speech and academic goals, but is this unexpected shift worse or just different? That I can ask myself this at all is a mercy, since so far, our cases are mild and we are weathering the storm mostly comfortable and at home.

I don’t know what else these next days of forced stillness will bring, but perhaps, just maybe, they will afford us time to reclaim the two-fold aspect of Advent. We are waiting in the truest sense of the word. I could pass the time just trying to make it through the stuck days, surviving, hoping the hours will pass as quickly as possible, so we can get back to our normal pre-Christmas frenzy. Or. I could ask what understanding the slowing and waiting might hold. 

Make no mistake. Staying at home with a kid who never really sits still while feeling fatigued myself is not going to be easy. It might be awful. He’ll probably watch a lot of television. I’ll probably raise my voice a few times. I'll almost certainly feel more haggard by the end of it than I would have if I were juggling all the activities of our normal lives. Still. Still. Our lives are suddenly still here at home. The minutes and hours and days will feel long and isolated. We’ve pushed pause for a while. 

I’m struck that the pause is probably more in the spirit of the original observances of Advent than I realized. Pause and wait. Pause and wonder. Pause and hope for a second coming yet to be. Even when our ability to understand it is abstract, unformed, and frankly, foreign. Advent isn’t just a time to busy our hearts and hands as we look back on the first incarnation of Christ. Can there be more to our looking forward than the anticipation and fulfillment of our favorite traditions? What if the anticipation held more? What if it held everything? The hope of all things made right. All things fulfilled. All things complete. A world reconciled to its Creator. The deepest, longest, and dearest exhale we could possibly dream of. In a way, Advent isn’t just a quickly passing season of Christmas. It’s a way of living every day of the year, with the hope of Emmanuel. God with us. Not once upon a time. But once and again. Once and for all time.

(By the way, it's a good thing we got that tree when we did. :/)