The Second Discourseman
Through the year, no season gives us such consciousness of time as Advent. We experience both the brevity of daily light and the sluggishness of winter, as we wait for the eternal Light to come once more into our world. This year it is even more stark. Our liberties seem likely to be quickly curtailed, and we wonder whether Christmas in its festive fullness will have to wait another twelve months. It has been suggested that these pandemic winters are the first in a long time which cause anxiety by the simple virtue of being winters. As our ancestors did year in, year out, we too brace ourselves.
I feel it personally. As I write, my head aches slightly and my nose is running. Four Lateral Flow Tests lie in my bin, all showing negative, but I’ve been advised that they can’t be relied upon. I suspect the worst, and frustration boils within. It seems desperately pathetic that life should grind to a halt over a sniffle; it seems disproportionate. I feel that I cannot pray, partly because I know that my mind is too full of resentment, but also because I question whether I can trust God. Can the hope of a baby born so long ago be so bright, as to shine for me and for this suffering world? It seems disproportionate. The frustration of Christ’s followers on discovering that he was a meek Servant and not an imperial warrior comes to mind.
O come, O come, Immanuel,
and ransom captive Israel
that mourns in lonely exile here
until the Son of God appear.
My discomfort is trivial, but even so it is valuable. In a society where Advent has become a mere extension of Christmas, it is strange for these to be weeks of worry; so, though it be no more than a toe dipped in the ocean, it is good to consider the seas of human sorrow and sin, and to see the light coming towards us in our Saviour’s hand. My full-blooded Nonconformist upbringing prods me to focus on the future weight of glory (and quite rightly), but my quietly growing Anglicanism lets me also pause and dwell on the present. I look forward to Christ’s return, but He is coming; He is not here yet. The stillness of the night confounds me still, and the star looks ever so far away.
Yet the stillness quietens my frustration, and as I watch the star amongst the blackness I learn of its magnificence in a way that one could never learn of the noonday sun. More and more I long for the day when I shall meet Jesus. For now, I look towards this year’s Christmas, praying that my heart will meet the incarnate Christ not with disdain or cynicism but with the reverence of Simeon, who held the Baby in his arms and declared, ‘mine eyes have seen thy salvation’.
In this regard, Advent is more than an opportunity to contemplate and anticipate; it is an act of waiting itself. Chesterton, talking of the seven-day week, describes ‘the enormous importance of daily life… as it is related to death and daylight and all the mysterious lot of Man’ [1]. The very passage and experience of time is useful, such that we need not lift ourselves out of the everyday in order to look forward to Christ’s coming.
Thus, where Chesterton asks, ‘What has really happened during the last seven days and nights?’, we may ask, ‘What has really happened during the last year?’ And where he answers, ‘Seven times we have been dissolved into darkness and seven times we have been raised alive like Lazarus’, we may answer, ‘We have walked in darkness and seen a great light; and on our land of deep darkness, the light has dawned.’
O come, O Bright and Morning Star,
and bring us comfort from afar!
Dispel the shadows of the night
and turn our darkness into light.
[1] From Seven Days’ Hard, a broadcast talk included in D. B. Wyndham Lewis’ G. K. Chesterton: An Anthology.
The Four Discoursemen 