Lifelong Advent as a Lifestyle.

We need moments for ourselves, sitting in silence and the dim light of candles like salt.

 The most significant Christian holiday, Easter, was preceded by a preparation period called Lent. A similar model was considered before the feast of the birth of Jesus Christ. The period called Advent saw the light of day relatively early, in the 5th century, in Ravenna. However, its introduction throughout the world took several more centuries.

Advent varied in length, eventually settling on four weeks, except in Orthodox churches, the Archdiocese of Milan, and other areas, where Advent still lasts six weeks today.

The perception of Advent was also different. It went from a penitential period similar to Lent to joyful anticipation. Today, Advent is a symbiosis of both.

Lifestyle

When a senior citizen who lived alone in an apartment building was asked what he did all day, he replied: “I wait one day for the lady with the pension and thirty days for the lady with the scythe.”

Everyone is waiting for someone or something. For a day of peace, healing, a new job, reconciliation, finding a partner… But also for a Friday concert, a visit from friends we haven’t seen in a long time, a party… Even those who feel like they have everything and don’t have to wait for anything are waiting to feel better and be happy.

The several-week pre-Christmas Advent, which means both arrival and waiting for it, thus turns into a lifelong epoch. And suddenly, it is no longer just a short preparatory period. It is, so to speak, a lifestyle.

Waiting

Waiting has a passive quality. It reminds us of a sad look out the window, a nervous walk through an airport, or tears when parents have no idea where their children are.

Even the pre-Christmas Advent is presented as a period of inactivity. But we need moments for ourselves, sitting in silence and the dim light of candles like salt. These are opportunities to synchronize the busy body with the restless soul for many new beginnings and active waiting.

We don’t have to wait for many things with folded arms. What we are waiting for can often be met; sometimes, it won’t even come without our activity.

If we are waiting to meet our life partner, we can do something about it. We can come out of our shells if we are waiting for reconciliation. If we are looking for relationship improvement, we can start with ourselves. Advent is also a symbiosis of peace and stirring up dust, contemplation and action, passivity and activity.

Simply put, we can wait for what we get under the tree or become someone’s Christmas present.

Time of hope

Waiting is necessarily accompanied by hope. “The world will belong to the one who can offer it the greatest hope,” says Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Many messiahs appear today, offering mountains and valleys, and many people believe them.

When the visions of the messiahs turn out to be, at best, dead ends, the people who believed them cling to new hope. Hope is what keeps us alive.

Christians believed that Jesus and his message brought them hope. However, if we look at this from the express perspective, we will find that Jesus did not offer a weightless life. Nor did he provide answers and solutions to all questions and problems—quite the opposite.

“The Advent cry, ‘Come, Lord Jesus!’ means that the whole of Christian history must be lived in deliberate emptiness, in deliberate fulfillment. Perfect fullness is yet to come, and we are not to demand it now,” writes Richard Rohr, somewhat surprisingly. And he explains: “This keeps our lives open to grace and a future created by God, not by us.” And this is precisely the hope of Christians.

It is a hope that does not even look like hope because it does not expect a solution or fullness here and now. However, it leaves room for God, who knows best how to fulfill this hope.

Advent allows us all to slow down so we can speed up in life and realize that if we don’t have everything, we have a place within us that God can fill.