Advent Sunday

Part of the clue to a re-invigorated vision of Advent lies in waiting — a waiting that rests not in frustration, but in stillness; not in frenzied expectation, but in an embracing of the present.

If we want to appreciate Advent fully, we need to re-learn how to wait; to rediscover the art of savouring the future, of staying in the present, and of finding meaning in the act of waiting.

It was only when I was pregnant with my first child that I realised that I had completely misunderstood what waiting was about. I am very bad at waiting. It makes me anxious, rest­less, and uneasy. No one who is expecting a child wants the waiting to end and the baby to come early — that can spell only heartache. The only thing to do in pregnancy is to wait.

It was during this period of enforced waiting that I began to discover that waiting is not just about passing the time between the moment when expectation is raised and when it comes to completion, in this instance between conception and birth, but that it has deep and lasting value in and of itself.

I discovered that waiting can be a nurtur­ing time, valuable in its own right. Until then, I had assumed that waiting could only ever be passive. How wrong I was. Pregnant waiting is a profoundly creative act, involving a slow growth to new life. This kind of waiting may appear passive externally, but internally con­sists of never-ending action, and is a helpful analogy for the kind of waiting that Advent requires.

For many of us, Advent is such a busy time with all our preparations for Christmas that the thought of stopping and sitting passively — while attractive in many ways — is simply impossible. Advent, however, does not de­mand passivity, but the utmost activity: active internal waiting that knits together new life.

One of the other things I learnt during pregnancy was that learning to savour the time of waiting allows us also to appreciate the event when it comes. The loss of an ability to wait often brings with it the inability to be fully and joyfully present now. Instead, we are constantly looking backwards to better times we used to know, and forwards to better times that may be coming. The more we do this, the more we miss the present.

Not only that, but it becomes hard to appreciate the future moment even when it does come. Many people speak of the feeling of deep anti-climax on Christmas Day when that long-expected day does not live up to expectations. Often the reason for this is that we live for ever in the future, so that, when the future becomes the present, we are ill-equipped to deal with it, and have lost the ability to be fully present, right now.

One of the many reasons why we wait in Advent is so that we hone our skills of being joyfully and fully present now. After a month of doing this, Christmas Day can gain a depth and meaning that would otherwise fly past in a whirl of presents and mince pies.

Such deep attention to the present cannot help but transform us as we learn — or relearn as the case may be — how to live deeply and truly in the present moment, so that we are con­tent to linger in our lives as they are now, and not be for ever striving onwards to the next goal...

God’s call to us remains a call to change: to leaving and accompanying, to moving and changing, to growing and flourishing. It is part of human nature to yearn for stability, to put down roots and stay put; but it is also a rule of nature that things which do not move do not live. Water that does not move becomes stagnant and in the same way when we do not move we become sluggish and hard to change. God’s call does not necessarily ask us to move our physical surroundings (although sometimes it does); most often it asks us to move our internal surroundings, to be prepared to be changed and transformed. God calls, and waits for our response…

These are edited extracts from The Meaning is in the Waiting: The spirit of Advent by Paula Gooder.