The Hope of Advent

Brothers and sisters, we find ourselves steaming our way through the second week of Advent. I write, then, with an enquiry of profound consequence. Are you truly awaiting the Lord of all hopefulness; what in your life needs healing? St. Augustine describes Adventide waiting thus:

‘My soul pines for your salvation’, that is, it languishes in its expectation. This is a happy weakness, for though it points up the desire for a good that is not yet obtained it also shows the eagerness with which it is sought.

If your soul does not eagerly seek the fullness of salvation, which is nothing less than the entire Kingdom of God, pray brothers and sisters that the Holy Spirit would come into your lives and show you the incorruptible promise of all God’s sons and daughters.

A proper grasp of Advent is perhaps best encapsulated with a view of God that is outside of linear time, that is, an understanding of the time in which all Christians dwell divided into the ‘now’ and ‘not yet’. The former (the ‘now’) is the time in which we dwell temporally, that is, in the wake of the Incarnation itself, when the cosmos, thanks to the Divine inbreaking, was altered forever.

The ‘not yet’ is the time, as the Revelation to St. John tells us, when:

They will hunger no more, and thirst no more; the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat; for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.

This is that great last day, the final eschaton, when, as Handel’s oratorio reminds us, ‘He shall reign forever and ever’. Advent merges these two times – the ‘now’ and the ‘not yet’ – into one, inviting us in the interim to drink deeply from the wellspring Himself, who bridges the chasm between both.

This, dear ones, is the meaning of Advent, and it’s one of great and true hope. Again, borrowing from St. Augustine, this hope of Advent ‘enables us to wait with patience for that which is not seen by those who believe’. This is what it means to cry out ‘Adveniat Regnum Tuum’ (Thy Kingdom come)!

May the waiting of Advent give you hope and courage amidst your afflictions, and may the coming peace of Christmas be yours, both now and always.

Yours in the Coming One,
CDW