Lifelong Advent as a lifestyle.

But what about Christians and people who can’t stay on the surface?

You can get to know each other. 

The most prominent Christian holiday, Easter, was preceded by a period of preparation in the form of Lent. A similar model was also considered before the holidays of the birth of Jesus Christ. The ” advent ” period saw the light of day relatively early in Ravenna in the 5th century. However, its introduction around the world took several more centuries.

Advent had different lengths. Finally, it settled on four weeks, except in Orthodox churches, the Archdiocese of Milan, and other areas, where Advent still lasts six weeks.

The perception of Advent was also different from a penitential period similar to Lent to joyful anticipation. Today, in Advent, we can perceive the symbiosis of one another.

Life style

When a senior living alone in a block of flats was asked what he does all day, he replied: “One day, I wait for a lady with a pension and thirty days for a lady with a 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, visiting friends we haven’t seen for a long time, for a party… Even those who feel they have everything and don’t have to wait for anything they expect to feel better and be happy.

The several-week pre-Christmas Advent, whose name means both arrival and waiting for it, turns into a lifelong epoch. And suddenly, it’s not just a short preparation period anymore. It’s a lifestyle.

Waiting

Waiting has a passive charge. It reminds me of a sad look out the window, nervously walking through the airport, or tears when parents have no idea where their children are.

Advent before Christmas is also presented as a period of inactivity. But we need moments for ourselves, sitting in silence and the darkness of candles like salt. They are an opportunity to synchronize the running body with the unruly soul to many new beginnings and active waiting.

You don’t have to wait for many things with your hands folded. What we are waiting for can often be met. Sometimes, it doesn’t even happen without our activity.

If we are waiting to meet our life partner, we can do something about it. If we wait for reconciliation, we can come out of our shell. If we look to improve relations, we can start with each other. Advent is also a symbiosis of peace, dust stirring, contemplation and action, and passivity and activity.

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

A time of hope

Hope is necessarily associated with waiting. “The world will belong to whoever can offer it the greatest hope,” says Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. That’s why many messiahs who offer mountains and valleys appear today, and many people believe them.

And when the visions of the messiahs turn out to be dead ends at best, the people who believed in them cling to new hope in hope. Hope is something that keeps us alive.

Christians believed that Jesus and his message brought them hope. If we look at him from the speedway, we will find that Jesus did not offer a weightless life. Not even answers and solutions to all questions and problems. On the contrary.

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

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

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