1st Sunday in Advent

Having just come out of a 30-day retreat, I had a rather jarring experience on Tuesday when I went into a mall for the first time in a month. But what added to the dissonance in my head was to see Christmas decorations all around the mall when we had not even begun Advent. Our contemporary age of instant gratification finds it hard to deal with waiting. Thus the season of Advent might well be the very antithesis of the defining characteristic of our consumerist age that seeks to fulfil human desire as efficiently and instantly as possible. Advent is all about knowing how to keep open a space of longing within ourselves that does not instantly get filled. The thing about waiting is that if the wait gets too long, we easily get bored. A little waiting is exciting and whets our appetite and actually leads to us enjoying the fulfilment of the desire when we finally obtain the object of our desire. But when the waiting is long and drawn out, we can quickly become bored and lose interest in the object of our desire, as anyone who has young kids can attest to. If you make them wait long enough for something that they desire, they lose interest in that object and when it finally comes along, they no longer want it, because they have moved on to the next distraction. We may laugh at our kids and how quickly they get bored of waiting for one thing and move on to the next distraction. But this is exactly what we do as adults when it comes to waiting for God.

Advent is poised between two big feasts – Christ the King that celebrates the fullness of God’s Reign on earth and Christmas which celebrates the beginning of that Reign. The way that the Reign begins with a powerless, vulnerable fragile little infant should tell us something about the God that we are waiting on. If Advent is strung between these two feasts, it becomes a symbol the “in-between time” that we are currently living in. In order to understand the meaning of the waiting we are called to during Advent, we almost need to invert the order of the two liturgical feasts that it is strung between. Advent is the gap between the powerless, fragile child Jesus that we celebrate at Christmas and the Kingly Messiah that we celebrate in Christ the King. We are waiting for the powerless and vulnerable Christ to be turned into a powerful King who reigns over our world. This will only be completely realized at His Second Coming. It is this Second coming that is spoken off in today’s gospel where Jesus speaks about the “Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory.” In a very literal sense what we are waiting for during Advent is the coming of Christmas. But in a historical sense, Christmas has already come and what we are waiting for at Advent is the second coming of Christ. It is in this sense we need to reverse the order of the feasts in order to understand what we are waiting for during Advent. We need to put Christmas first, then the gap of Advent, and then Christ the King. Of course, the way our liturgical calendar is arranged requires that Christ the King come at the end of the year and Christmas at the beginning, but Advent has always been the period linked with waiting for the fulfilment of the promised Kingdom of God that Christ preached.

We have been waiting for 2,000 years for the fulfilment of Christ’s promise to return in glory and power. By any reckoning, this is a long time to have to wait, and it is in this sense we are more like children than we would like to admit and have become bored and let ourselves become distracted by other desires. This is why Jesus alerts us to the dangers that come with trying to anesthetize ourselves against boredom. He warns that we should not allow “our hearts to become drowsy with drunkenness and cavorting and the distractions of daily life.” When the events of our lives no longer contain within them the ability to satisfy our wanderlust and desire for excitement – we either try to create the excitement for our selves (cavorting) or seek to anesthetize the desire itself for excitement and dull the pain of boredom by getting lost in drunkenness.

Advent is all about recommitting to our reality and seeking out the ways in which our reality already contains the hope that our souls crave. When we become convinced that our present reality is boring and does not contain the hope that our souls need, we can be tempted to drift off into fantasy. This is one temptation that is covered by Jesus’ warning against “cavorting.” It is true that sometimes we give into the temptation to actually go cavorting and lose ourselves in all manner of sensual pleasures that only leave us with a bitter aftertaste of emptiness in our mouths. But I would be willing to bet that most of us have got sufficient self-control to know that actually going cavorting is only a dead-end. We have managed to overcome the pleasure-principle such that actual cavorting has been taken of the table as a viable temptation for us. Instead, what we are tempted to do is to go “cavorting” in our imaginations. Again, the fantasies that tempt us are probably not going to be fantasies of going partying and painting the town red. They are going to be more sophisticated escapes from reality that see us morph into far more intelligent, powerful, attractive and exciting versions of ourselves. We can lose ourselves in day-dreams of how we finally get the recognition and love from others that we so long for.

Our imaginations are powerful tools that God has given us in order to be able to create a world different from the one that we find in reality. When our imaginations are employed in order to be able to dream up a way to change the world into something better, more beautiful, more just, more sustainable – then we are using them in the way that God intended they be used. All human creativity depends on the imagination, and the gifts of the arts in all their multi-varied forms bring great colour and excitement to our world. It is clear that Jesus used his imagination extensively as a teacher in his use of parables and metaphor. In today’s gospel, Jesus invites us to enter into an imaginative world, one that is rather scary, with portents and great signs in the sun and moon and stars. This is certainly not the imaginative world of our fantasies, but it is perhaps a more healthy place for our imaginations to wander. The scene that Jesus’ imagination paints for us is not designed like a Hollywood genre of Apocalypse films to evoke fear. Rather, Jesus’ stark images are crafted in order to evoke wonder and awe before the mighty power of God that far outstrips any human display of power. Here we might think of the destruction and violence wrought by all the wars going on in our world. God’s power far outstrip humanity’s massive capacities for destruction and it is in the images of God’s awesome power that our imaginations must learn to dwell if we are to draw hope in the midst of our current war-torn world. May the Lord enkindle in our hearts the desire to see God’s Kingdom arrive in our midst with power and glory.

Questions for reflection

1. Do you allow yourself to become depressed and disheartened by all the war and suffering that are the perpetual headlines of our contemporary media? How might a reawakened desire for the Second Coming of Christ combat this depression?
2. What are your default responses to boredom?
3. How can you use the power of fantasy and imagination for good in your spiritual life and emotional life?