London Spirituality Network Blog

Having moved here from the United States in February, I find that I’m especially looking forward to Christmas, and surprisingly, Advent.

Advent wasn’t a season that we celebrated in my family or in my church growing up. That is, we didnt’t celebrate it more than living through the usual so-called holiday season that takes place in the States. From the last Thursday in November – American Thanksgiving – there’s a mad dash of parties and events and endless shopping through to Christmas and the beyond. If the day after Thanksgiving is the biggest shopping day in the US (and it is), then the second biggest must be Boxing day, because it seems that everyone goes shopping to cash in on the good deals in the after-Christmas sales, many people stock up on cards and decorations for the next year. While my family didn’t necessarily engage in the whole crazy event while I was growing up, still we were drawn along into the mad dash. Even those who seek to resist the headlong fall into consumerism and overindulgence as I have tried to do in my adult life, the draw is powerful, and it is far too easy to be pulled into an unhappy participation in too much busy-ness, too much food and drink, too much buying.

From what I’ve been able to discern, that pull into an overdone month in the United Kingdom is not unlike that in the US, though there is clearly there is a real Sabbath on Christmas day. Still, before the end of November I went by several Christmas fairs and festivals, shops are cluttered with glittery decorations and adverts loudly demand that we buy, buy, buy.

Which is why it’s worth asking some questions, considering the path over the next few weeks to Christmas day.

Advent is about waiting and about expecting. It is the late stage of pregnancy for Mary, if we follow the story, a time of journeying toward Bethlehem, where she deliver a son. Surely she aches in these last weeks, the child kicking, and not enough room for her lungs any longer so breath is hard to come by. Surely, too, does Joseph, loving her and vulnerable, and lost, stunned by the turn of events, yet by her side. On these days of travel for the couple, it must be easier than facing the judgement of their families, in their small village. On the road and anonymous, with no one the wiser about their life, no one the wiser about the holy one who is about to be born, they rest more easily as they make their way to Bethlehem.

But I get ahead of myself in telling the story of what is to come. Still in advent, with Christmas some time away, let us consider the question of what we are waiting for.

What, do you suppose, are we waiting for?

We live in a secular age: an time when the myths and legends of the past come to us as so much fairy tale and fanciful reverie, not as a window into the truth. Discovering truth, that’s the purview of science, the collection of facts constructed in the right way tell us something correct and, we hope, useful.

The myths of people from thousands of years ago are often disregarded, not taken as offering truth, as something old and outdated.

Yet, year in and out over nearly two millennia people have gathered and told this story: a babe born as low as could be, who is the one who will bring peace to all the nations, the one who will save us all from despair and fear, save us from being lost and abandoned, save us from the emptiness that is all we know sometimes.

And every year, I fight with my own cynicism as I consider

• the amount of hatred that cloaks itself in Christianity,
• and the millennia of failed hopes,
• and the chaos of a world still not saved,
• still in peril,
• still guided more by greed than goodness,
• still armed beyond human reason much less beyond the realm of God’s love,

And every year nonetheless, I listen to the story and wait for the hope to be reborn in the stable of my heart.

That’s what I’m waiting for.

And each year I have to remind myself that I’m not waiting for that big old Daddy God who will break in and fix everything. I have to remind myself that I’m not waiting for some magical, supernatural, being who can swoop in and transform the world that we live in into a more gentle and peaceful place. I’m not even waiting for something fully formed and defined.

The story, after all, is about the birth of a baby. This is not Athena, springing fully formed from the head of God. This God who is born is a tiny creature, unable to live without the care and love of his parents, unable to live without the intervention of kind strangers, a baby threatened with death before he even knows well how to suckle his mother’s breast.

Denise Levertov describes this God well in ‘Mass for the Day of St Thomas Didymus,’ the section entitled ‘Agnus Dei’, or ‘Lamb of God’

God then,
encompassing all things, is
defenseless? Omnipotence
has been tossed away, reduced
To a wisp of damp wool?
And we,
frightened, bored, wanting
only to sleep till catastrophe
has raged, clashed, seethed and gone by without us,
wanting then
to awaken in quietude without remembrance of agony,
we who in shamefaced private hope
had looked to be plucked from fire and given
a bliss we deserved for having imagined it,
is it implied that we
must protect this perversely weak
animal, whose muzzle’s nudgings
suppose there is milk to be found in us?
Must hold to our icy hearts
a shivering God?

The parents will not find a proper place for the baby to be born into the world, shivering though wrapped in swaddling clothes, only the rough trough used for feeding the animals to lay the infant. The story tells us that God we await is a shivering God that needs each of us to be born.

This season, I wait. I wait to finally be able to say with the poet:

So be it.
Come, rag of pungent
quiverings,
dim star.
Let’s try
if something human still
can shield you,
spark
of remote light.

Christmas comes not with a saviour entering stage left, with magical powers, or sword drawn. Christmas comes with that which is vulnerable, and tiny and utterly dependent on us, utterly dependent upon us to bring it to life, to nurture, to cradle and help grow.

Through the blare of tinny carols played on bad sound systems in the shops, past the too bright tinsel and glitter of the season, I will await to welcome the vulnerable, shivering, quivering God, to shelter and shield in my own heart. May you, too, find such a God, a spark of remote light to hold within you, and carry with joy into the world.