As we prepare to celebrate the First Sunday of Advent, we realise that the rhythms of nature are echoed in the fixtures of the Church calendar.
All human lives and cultures are marked by rhythms of waiting and celebrating. Children wait impatiently for the end of term and for the beginning of the holidays. Parents sometimes wait out the last days of school holidays longing for the precious time when children return to school! The week before football Grand Finals is a time of impatient waiting that explodes into the excitement of the Big Game.
NATURE’S RHYTHMS
This pattern of waiting and celebrating echoes nature’s larger rhythms. The time to sow leads to a time to reap, winter to spring, reaping to harvest. These rhythms are echoed in the fixtures of the Church calendar. Feasts are preceded by Vigils, celebrated exuberantly, and are followed by Octaves. In most Christian Churches the two largest celebrations are those of Jesus’ birth and of his death and rising. The heart of faith lies in God’s love for us shown by Jesus’ dying and rising from the dead. The feast that celebrates it is preceded by five weeks of prayer and followed by many weeks of celebration. The four weeks of Advent look forward to Christmas, which is followed its own week of celebration. Behind these rhythms of waiting and celebration lies the deeper Christian vision of life as a period of waiting and of preparing with Christ for the joyful celebration of eternal life with him in heaven.
Advent is a period of promise and of hope that might sustain us in even the hardest of times. The Mass readings of Advent draw again and again on the Book of Isaiah.
BUOYANT HOPE
These passages are full of an extraordinarily buoyant hope, of images of peace, of flowing waters, green fields, tree covered hills, abundant harvests, peace and of a God who is with the people.
Yet Isaiah’s world was one which the Jewish people, including himself, would have seen as a time of darkness, full of dark nights and dark clothing. The people had been overrun in war, sent into exile, and had lost their temple, their land and their confidence in their God. Today, we might recall the suffering of the people of Gaza. In contrast, Isaiah’s vision of a return to their own land in peace, in which they would enjoy respect and plenty, is painted in bright technicolour. He does not describe their current miserable life in exile as the new normal but as a time of waiting for return to a glorious new world. He reminded the people that God’s special friends are those who are doing it hard, and that God will rescue them.
Advent today encourages us to enter the experience of people in our own world who are exiled from their home, wait on the kindness of strangers for survival, and survive as best they can. Among these are refugees who share the experience of Isaiah and the Jewish people. They have also had to leave their homes, often separated from their families, struggling without support in a wealthy land, and unable to do anything more than dream of a decent life.
KEEP THEM IN OUR HEARTS
We may not be able to give them a home, but during Advent, we can keep them in our hearts, spending time to know them better, and through our support doing for them what Isaiah did for his own people. We can encourage them to hope that one day a Christmas will come when they will be able to begin living full lives.
Advent gives way to Christmas. That is a time to look forward to and celebrate, as we might a Grand Final with a stacked stadium and our team sure to win. The first Christmas in contrast was a quiet occasion in which the celebrating took place deep within human hearts. It had the intensity of joy that comes with the birth of a new-born and eagerly awaited baby at the end of a hard pregnancy. That joy spread and changed the world.
Fr Andrew Hamilton SJ is an editorial consultant at Jesuit Communications
