Yesterday was the first Sunday of Advent.  I’ve been writing about Advent off and on for over a decade, which points towards how resonant the idea of Advent is for me (particularly since I’m not a member of a liturgical church tradition).

As I understand it, Advent is the beginning of the church calendar, a time preceding Christmas where Christians remember the first coming of Jesus and anticipate his second.  While some churches fast during this time, many do not.  A number of churches, perhaps most especially those who have adopted the season from another tradition, treat it like a preamble to Christmas with a little bit of waiting, but not a lot.  And waiting is what I like most about the season.  Because waiting is a regular part of my life, and because waiting is difficult.  Consider these words from James K. A. Smith’s recent newsletter:

And so we turn, finally, to Advent. The long slog of ordinary time gives way to the focus of a season.The irony, of course, is that it is a season of waiting.

This year, I am particularly struck by how bad we are at waiting for God. Or at least how poorly I wait. This is not simply because of impatience, though that is certainly true. It’s also–maybe more so–because we seem to lack the capacity to recognize God’s arrival. God never shows up like those waiting would expect.

Smith continues:

We look for God in the extraordinary and God arrives incarnate in the mundane, even abject, hidden right before our eyes. We’re waiting and waiting and miss the fact that “God has taken place” perhaps because we keep scanning the horizons for meteoric arrivals. Or maybe because we’re too distracted. What if the arrival happened and we’re only still waiting because we couldn’t recognize it? Maybe what we’re waiting for is not the arrival but the healing of our attention so we might see where God has already taken place.

I think Smith is onto something here, but mainly because he’s putting into words some things that have been on my mind a lot lately.  Waiting has been a long-term theme for me that has taken on more importance these last few months as I reflect as a way for preparing for the future.  It’s also been something of a theme in a book or two that I’ve been reading over the last few months (one that I will get into more over the next few days).  All that to say: I think we all need to learn how to wait, and we need others to wait with us.  This should be something that Christians do extremely well, though I’m not sure how true that is in practice.  (I know it’s not as true of me as I would like.)

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Yesterday I was getting some grading done, so I brought up an Advent playlist that I had made back in 2019.  Present me was quite impressed with the song choice of past me.  The following song by Andrew Peterson, which is not technically an Advent song, struck me in the strong presence of waiting in the lyrics.  It doesn’t hurt that this concert version begins with a Lord of the Rings quote and comment.

Listening to it yesterday reminded me why I loved that song, and the album it is from, so much.

So here’s to Advent.  And here’s to learning to wait.