Confessions of a Catholic in an Advent funk
iStock/TheDmanIt has been an unchristmassy Christmastime so far this year. At least for me. Cold without snow, dark without mystery. Even while walking through a winter wonderland—last week at Longwood Gardens, a local 1,100-acre public garden in Kennett Square, Pa.—I didn’t feel the magic of the season. I put up my Christmas decorations in early November, right around the time of the election. Even my beautiful tree does not goad me into making merry.
I cannot put my finger on the source of my angst. I cannot even tell if it is angst. But something feels unchristmassy about me and about my world.
The worst part of this funk is that I have not been to church. I don’t even know why. Christians have been observing Advent for over three weeks now, and I haven’t even been to church. Mall Santa is charging parents $50 for their kids to sit on his lap, and the radio is playing holiday music around the clock, and our community hung a wreath at the entrance, and I haven’t even been to church.
I suppose some well-meaning Christian might be tempted to assure me that my gloomy Advent journey isn’t unlike the first: People who were down on their luck, living anxiously under the shadow of a powerful state, were waiting for God to come and flood their world with good news. Their waiting was laborious and exhausting, but it wasn’t faithless. They looked forward to the coming of Christ, believing that his early morning cry would shatter the darkness of their despair and usher in a new era of peace and glad tidings.
Like many of the stories and theologies that swirl around and from the infancy narratives, our contemporary approaches to Advent sometimes feel a little too, let’s say, ready-made. Like a frozen dinner, we pop our Nativities into the microwave expecting that, when the timer goes off, we will get exactly what we expected. But does this demystify the compelling drama of Advent? While the people of Israel certainly hoped for a Messiah, Jesus himself was surely a surprise: No one had “God saves the world through a poor baby” on their Bingo card. There was no Nativity scene set up 2,000 years ago with an empty manger.
Jesus’ followers, who interpreted his life, death and resurrection within the context of their Jewish faith traditions, worked hard to make meaning of events that pushed their theology to its breaking point. To even get at who Jesus was and what God was up to with him, they opened their Scriptures and got to work. By reading the story of Jesus intertextually with their prophets, they found new contexts emerged for interpreting his significance. And so, for instance, the birth of Jesus could be seen as God’s making good on an age-old prophecy about a virgin giving birth to a son.
And as a member of the Christian community, I say yes and amen. Well, yes and amen, but.
It is fine and necessary that our theological imaginations expand over time. Two thousand years has given us a lot of time to reflect on God’s coming in Jesus, the incarnation. The last two millennia of Christian theology have been a commentary on what the Nicene Creed sums up:
For us men and for our salvation
He came down from heaven,
And by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary,
And became man.
This creed ought to be in every Christian’s mind at Christmastime. Yes and amen. But…
This creed wasn’t in the minds of those who experienced whatever we mean by “the first Christmas.” For many of them, the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem was unexpected. Nobody would have hoped for God to rescue the world in precisely this way, with that child, in that manger. We can read our Bibles intertextually, like the earliest Jesus movement did, and believe that Jesus’ birth is the fulfillment of prophecy. But we might also, while gazing at the fussy baby refusing to sleep, wonder, with his mom: “How can this be? Is God really up to something with this baby? What exactly is God planning?”
Like all of our liturgical celebrations, Advent works on us. It’s supposed to. But liturgy works best when it expands our imagination, not scales it back. My concern with Advent is that it can reduce our hoping for the surprising act of God to waiting for God to give us what we expect.
Advent tells us exactly what we are waiting for: Jesus to be placed in the manger. But the forebears of our faith traditions were not waiting for a what but a whom. From Psalm 27:
I believe that I shall look upon the goodness of the Lord
in the land of the living.
Wait for the Lord; be strong and let your heart take courage.
Wait for the Lord!
They might not have known exactly how God was going to act, but they put their trust in him. They hoped for God. Exactly what he was going to do when he showed up…well, that is for him to figure out. Maybe he will send us a baby who will grow up to become a prophet. Maybe he’ll have a different idea.
To me, this is one lesson of Advent: the radical contingency of it all. God could have saved the world differently. God could have visited us in a different way. In fact, God does this all the time. We might not see it, though, because we have too-specific ideas about what our Nativity scene should look like.
Are we open to it looking different? How might God fill our empty manger come Christmas day? If we’re thinking with an imagination formed by Jesus’ own teachings, then we should plan to be surprised by what we will find. Three wise men kneeling before an undocumented immigrant; Joseph looking lovingly at our political rival; sheep bleating next to an estranged family member.
Advent isn’t primarily a reminder that God keeps his promises, but that he shocks the gray monotony of our lives by acting in ways we could never have predicted.
Which is good news for me because my churchless Advent season has been very gray.
Brandon
Ambrosino teaches in the Augustine and Culture Seminar Program at
Villanova University. He has a Ph.D. from Villanova in theology and
ethics and is currently studying bioethics at Loyola University Chicago.
His writing has appeared in a variety of outlets, including Politico,
BBC, Christian Century, Globe & Mail, and Commonweal.
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