Faith and Plans

Waiting in Wonder - The Advent Test

Artist Anna Brones writes: “Tradition is what allows us to tap into the sacred. It is through ritual that we build the scaffolding that holds us.” Like many Americans, I struggle to juggle a cascade of holiday “stuff” each December. Looking for wonder and magic amongst all the events, to-do lists, and expectations can be challenging this time of year. But as a person of faith, I approach Christmas with a spiritual as well as cultural lens.

The season of Advent - four weeks leading to December 25th - is a big part of my scaffolding, as important as the big day itself. Steeped in traditions invoking hope, peace, joy, and love, Advent is more about internal preparation than external.

It offers alternate avenues to wonder in these early December days.

And it has its own kind of messiness.^¹

Advent slow-walks toward a holiday that everybody seems to be trying to celebrate right now. Instead of tinseling over the dark and chill, it embraces reflection, renewal, and my lifelong nemesis - waiting.

Amidst the overwhelm of sensory inputs and exterior opportunities in the holiday season, Advent is countercultural. And hard.

The critical self-assessment people do each December is pretty striking:

“I’m so behind”

“Life has gotten away from me”

“I’m just not gonna do it all this year”

As if our lives were measured in successful presentations of holiday happiness.

It’s not too dissimilar from creative self-flagellation. We can never do quite enough to satisfy expectations. We imagine ourselves working on something magical, but until someone else deems it special, it’s hard to recognize the brilliance of our own output.

So, we wait - for the congratulations, the call, the purchase, the show, the approval - like we wait for that sense of holiday completion/competency, and thus, gladness. If only we had some sort of shortcut to wrap it all up with a bow on top.

But Advent is a season of slow, slow magic. Tom Petty was absolutely right to call it, “the hardest part,” but waiting is necessary to creators’ and seekers’ journeys. We have to “take it on faith” to keep going. We have to release expectations, sacrifice.

My treat motivated dog may disagree…

Behind and beyond any anticipation is longing and uncertainty wrapped up in waiting. But waiting is not so much something we’re meant to get good at as a skill for reconciling with life. It turns us inward, and as internality is the linchpin of creativity, it challenges us to see differently.

The discipline of waiting sharpens our senses about what we’re searching for - is it really a splendid light display twinkling over a perfectly winterized garden? Window dressings? A gloss of decoration signaling festivity? Or do we need to embrace dark mornings, barren trees (and in the PNW, mud) as beauties in and of themselves? Might I become more open to more muted, less shiny realizations of my dreams?

Kate Bowler, in her podcast Everything Happens, calls Advent a time of “living with eyes wide open—seeing the world as it is, with all its cracks and flaws, and still holding on to the hope that everything wrong will one day be made right.” It’s the opposite of burying our heads in the box of ornaments to avoid failure or pain.

And Advent ushers in a period of intentional remembrance of the need to balance anticipation with letting go. Instead of rushing to celebrate my hopes, I have to spend time re-recognizing life’s mashup of beginnings and endings; acknowledging that progress doesn’t necessarily happen the way I want. I have to wait for what I can’t control. Faith is ballast for plans that may or may not work out.

It’s a difficult truth that we own our actions, but not necessarily the fruits of our actions². But taking stock of one’s thought life - refocusing on what is foundational, as Michael Marsh encourages in a recent Interrupting the Silence blogpost - is how we manage our disconnect between faith and plans. It’s how we recommit to the future while living “in the gap” between our hopes and reality.

So, this Advent, before stuffing my senses with the “more” of the holidays, I’m trying to war less with waiting. I’m paying attention to the here and now, searching for hopeful magic behind, beyond, in, and around the cracks and flaws of our world. I’m invoking Jan Richardson’s Blessing for Waiting, and reconciling my wants with the limits of my control.

You, too, may be blessed by some waiting. Drop a comment to let us know about it.

1. You can see I’ve still got pumpkins on the table though we’re well ‘round the corner of December, but I hate to hurry my tradition transitions.

2. This idea is spoken by Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita