Advent for the Troubled Soul
If you are weighted down, despairing, or on the ragged edge, these days are for you.
The celebration of Advent is possible only to those who are troubled in soul, who know themselves to be poor and imperfect, and who look forward to something greater to come. He is, and always will be now, with us in our sin, in our suffering, and at our death. We are no longer alone. {Dietrich Bonhoeffer}
How can it be that Advent—these sparse days given to grieving prophets and a hard reckoning with our dire predicament—has taken on a measure of kitsch alongside Elf on the Shelf? Advent is ache and silence. Advent is for poor fools who’ve crashed into the end of the line. Yet we’ve somehow arrived at Advent bougie. The Powers of Enterprise have proven they can employ absolutely anything in the service of the holiday blitzkrieg.
In October, I walked through a department store’s cosmetics menagerie and bumped into a 7-foot banner promoting a high priced Advent calendar where, each day, you open the little box and receive a glossy lip balm or wrinkle-vanishing cream or glow drops. And the religious industry matches, with the avalanche of glossy Advent product, the press to maximize the Advent season, the pressure to make sure we do Advent “right.” We Christians are adept at bludgeoning flat every ounce of mystery.
The truth is I believe in taking any opportunity to revel in whatever season’s available (Christian or not), and most of us (those pulling the strings for dollars excepted) are doing the best we know to find hope and goodness. And I’m confident if we follow the scent, even sometimes going the wrong way like the fox, we’ll eventually run headlong into grace.
However, I won’t let go of how Advent is for the helpless, the heartbroken, the world-weary. Advent is for those who have no words, no capacity, to name how sorrow or regret or evil has shattered their lives, shattered their families. Advent is for the dying, for the bewildered, for the silenced, for those heavy with shame or despair. Advent, writes Fleming Rutledge, “bids us take a fearless inventory of the darkness.” In Advent, we face what’s terrifying, crushing, and harsh, owning how we are helpless to concoct any remedy. And our attempt to manufacture a breathless, sunny-side-up spirituality is dishonest and at any rate, provides no genuine help.
Advent meets us in our grief over a child, in our silent despair over a stack of past due bills. Advent moves among the abandoned innocent in Gaza. And if our Advent doesn’t land amid every human struggle and misery, then it’s no Advent at all.
These truths stand fast because Advent is about God. The season is not centered on self-discipline or concocting a slate of new practices to mark Christmas-before-Christmas. In Advent, our job is important but minimal: stay awake and watchful and do our best to hold on til help comes. We’re responsible, but not for much. God’s the actor, the Savior, the one who “delivers us out of all our terror and saves us from our troubles.” It is God “who shines on those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death,” God who “dispels the shadows of the night and turns our darkness into light.”
We don’t go looking for sadness—there’s plenty, and it eventually finds each of us. Sometimes, our work is to recognize how there’s a riot of joy and happiness too, everywhere. Yet Advent is where we enact the faith and courage to acknowledge anguish wherever it appears. Then we hold out our flickering flame to God, the one who bows low and tends to troubled souls.
"We Christians are adept at bludgeoning flat every ounce of mystery."
Word.
In Advent, our job is minimal: stay awake and watchful and do our best to hold on til help comes. We’re responsible, but not for much.
Thank you, Winn. We needed this to be written.