Sometimes when someone is dying they have a distant look in their eyes, like they are seeing very, very far, a vast distance that is rapidly approaching, quickly encroaching.
That stare of infinite distance. Advent is like that.
The weariness of waiting and longing for what never arrives but is almost here, forever just beyond our reach.
Waiting for a rescue that never arrives, shipwrecked watching the ocean, lighting the bonfire that no one will ever see.
Holding on, waiting and praying for a cure that never arrives, a life that never catches hold, a love that is never returned.
A longing and a waiting that is painful.
A distance that is blinding.
Advent.
Today is New Year’s Day, the first day of the Christian year, and Christians have marked this time of beginning with the season of Advent.
We begin waiting. Not with placid Zen calmness.
But with the waiting that hurts.
We can see the way of God, the way of peace, the arrival of the King who will renew and fulfill all things. But it isn’t yet.
We have been given a taste of what the world is to be, what creation is intended for, a glimpse of how things ought to be.
But it isn’t now.
The “oughtness” of things, the “shouldness” of life, the justice, the peace, the right relations that bring flourishing, we long for these.
We have been wounded by the knowledge that those divine patterns exist, that they are real.
Yet we live with razor wire and tear gas.
Which cuts deeper? The longing or the cold steel?
That is Advent, especially today, the first Sunday that marks the beginning, the ending and the purpose of all things.
We see the precious beauty of the world, of life, of each other, God has shown us. Yet we misuse the holy intention of reality itself.
We trample the flowers and fruit of generations in a moment.
The wound of knowing there is more.
The bitterness at the absence of what should be.
The waiting that never ends.
Life in the Spirit carries a burden and a grief.
That is why the joy and the hope of faith are so belligerent and contrary. We celebrate what isn’t yet as if it were already here.
That is why the mercy that is justice, and the justice that is mercy are a beauty that is so abrasive, because we see it, we know it’s there, and we try to live it and we fail.
That is why forgiveness, radical hospitality and foolish generosity seem so out of place.
They are the encroaching kingdom, the Advent of the King, disrupting our bitter resentments. They are the blinding eternity of God staring us down, daring us to surrender to the ways of grace.
It is so far.
It is such a long time.
It will never be here.
Yet it has arrived, it is in our midst even now.
Advent. The song of unrequited longing, calling for what will be to hurry up and get here.
A joy that is a grief.
A waiting that is a fulfillment.
Advent. The season of hope that is so strong that it bends gravity into levity.
What weighs us down lifts us up.
We begin, again and again.