While it didn’t quite happen, I did have high hopes for a solid Advent season. I had planned on slowly reading through some of Augustine’s “Advent homilies” as recently collected by the Davenant Institute. Unfortunately, not even pre-ordering the books weeks in advance could make up for spotty shipping that saw the book get here just a few days ago.
Having said that, the readings from the Daily Office have been solid: Isaiah and both Thessalonian epistles and 2 Peter. That set of New Testament letters rarely, if ever, get much airtime in any church more taken with Paul’s other letters (or James, which seems to be the go-to General Epistle for many). Isaiah is a great mix of strange and familiar, which is always nice this time of year. And the same for the epistles, which bridge the Incarnation and His Return really, really well.
The best short piece I’ve read about the season is this piece from Anthony Robinson over at Mockingbird. A couple of quality quotes:
Advent is a season that tells an important truth, one we need to hear, perhaps especially in the weeks before Christmas when the pressure can be on to be constantly jolly and generally perfect.
Advent positions the church where we do in fact live, between hope and fulfillment, and in contested territory where all that distorts, disfigures, and destroys life is yet real and powerful.
And after remembering the medieval focus of Advent on “the last things,” Robinson writes:
Nowadays, we name the four Sundays of Advent, hope, peace, joy, and love and light a candle on the Advent wreath for each one in turn. A return to the older themes is, well, let’s just say “unlikely.” Probably just as well. I’m sure the death, judgment, heaven, and hell menu gave rise to plenty of fearmongering sermons and urgings to “clean up your act or else,” which by the way is not the gospel.
Still, the modern quartet — hope, peace, joy, and love — do suggest that we don’t have a lot of room for the darker side, which is often now relegated to a special “Blue Christmas” service for those who can’t quite pull off the bright-side program of this, “the most wonderful time of the year.”
“The darker side” is such an interesting thing, something that we all know about but can’t seem to name very well (perhaps in our rush to get to the light of Christmas). The older I get, the more important framing is for me. Context matters. And the context of living this life matters. It’s the reminder of Paul to the Colossian church: that we have been rescued from the dominion of darkness and brought into the kingdom of his beloved Son. But the darkness is still there; we’re still in the world. And we’re still waiting for the Brighter Light to shine fully.
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So I’ve got my Augustinian Advent collection to read (it helps that they are quite short). I’m also slowly rereading “The World’s Last Night” by C. S. Lewis, which I think about often this time of year (and any time I’m reading anything slightly apocalyptic in the Bible). Advent’s not over yet. The darkness is passing away, but it also has deep roots and a real presence in our lives and the world around us. This season is set to remind us of that, and that we ought not be hopeless, for hope has come into the world.
This past weekend was a rare, double-feature weekend for me. First up was The Outrun, which tells the story of a recovering alcoholic trying to make-do in the Orkney Islands. The lead, Rona, is played by Saoirse Ronan, whose life is told in jarring-but-effective flashbacks involving both family and friends. She is a sympathetic character, one whose pain and suffering and frustration you can feel. It’s an incomplete story, of course, but aren’t they all?
A Real Pain tells a kind of full-circle story, with opening and closing shots taking place in a busy airport, where Culkin’s character enjoys getting to know those around him. But what you feel at the end isn’t quite the same sensation that you hade with the opening scene. A Real Pain, it turns out, has at least two meanings: one obvious, one less so. It’s the double-meaning that stays with you as the credits roll.
Fred Sanders begins The Deep Things of God with a distinction that is worth making in many areas: the emphatic and the reductionistic. He’s thinking specifically of the Trinity in relation to the many other things that healthy evangelical Christians think about. The emphatic, of course, has to do with emphasis. Sanders asserts that healthy evangelism has landed on a few things for real emphasis: the Bible, the cross, conversion, and heaven. Sanders’s concern is that other key things get loss when things are under-emphasized and forgotten, what he calls an “anemic condition.” An example:
Space Enough, and Time 