A number of months ago, Hubby Dear sent me a copy of an email he had received. It arrived, as always, with a comment. Perhaps the message would be more appropriately described as a commentary accompanied by a not-so-subtle hint to consider the contents for a possible column. As always, I heeded the suggestion, but did not immediately act on it! Time spent in patient pondering is my usual option.
So, here we are in the onset of the Advent season when the atmosphere is laden with desires and dreams, as well as the annual angst over what to purchase and how to pay for it. Salvation Army bell ringers eagerly try to dispel the dismay and bring us to a deeper level of concern. They attempt to call us to a different kind of giving, one that is not glittering with superficiality but replete with a longing for the deepened living that cannot be purchased. It can only be received when we hunger and thirst for shared life.
In his email, H. D. noted an article bearing a commentary on Susan Cain’s book “Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole.” This may well be viewed, at first, as a real “downer.” It may even dampen our Advent hopefulness as we await the incarnation that Christmas memorializes; however, it is also a reality. Cain terms it “the problem of being alive in a deeply flawed yet stubbornly beautiful world.”
She avows her belief that “longing is momentum in disguise: It’s active, not passive; touched with the creative, the tender, and the divine. We long for something, or someone. We reach for it, move toward it. The word longing derives from the Old English “lanigan,” meaning “to grow long,” and the German “langen”…to reach, to extend. The word yearning is linguistically associated with hunger and thirst, but also desire. In Hebrew, it comes from the same root as the word for passion.”
I sense its presence as a holy longing for deepened living. I see it as Advent living, a time for yearning and waiting; hoping and dreaming; seeking and finding. It’s uniquely a preparation time for new birth. And, as Cain suggests, it is replete with the bittersweet. An “enchanted loom of longing on which we weave the tapestry of meaning,” it “exists in the liminal space between the spiritual, the physiological, and the psychological.”
That’s a mouthful to swallow when we are encased in artificiality and superficiality. It’s a challenge to replace store-bought gifts with spiritual graces. It’s not easy to live with Advent longing, but it is certainly worthwhile. It is worth our time and energy, our sight and insight, our caring and compassion. It is truly a sacred waiting time, not for something to happen but to enter the “happening.”
Susan Cain calls it “the bittersweet,” “a tendency to states of longing, poignancy, and sorrow; an acute awareness of passing time; and a curiously piercing joy at the beauty of the world.”
Yes, it is bittersweet. Birthing bears both joy and pain, eagerness and anxiety, believing and fearing. Waiting commands patience, perseverance, and powerlessness. It also offers the grounds for hope. To wait is to give ourselves a unique gift. Walt Whitman describes it as “the gift of feeling deeply all of life’s hues and so touching its beauty more deeply.”
Advent, then, is more than a countdown to Christmas. It is more than a preparation for Hanukkah, Yule or any other December holiday. Advent is a time when waiting and longing conjoin as necessary preparations for new birth. It is a pregnant time replete with change and growth; promise and possibility; joy and concern; wonder and wishing; knowing and not knowing.
Advent allows us to give ourselves time to stop our frenetic activity. It empowers us to dare entry into the liminal space of faithful waiting. It offers us the space we need to breathe more deeply and see more clearly what is real and true and necessary.
Advent is bittersweet time. Like dark chocolate, it melts slowly and deliberately on the tongue and lingers long after the last morsel had been swallowed. The memory remains to impel another taste, another try, another absorption of life in all its vagaries.
Christmas will come. Birthing of new life will happen. Yet, it will never arrive unaccompanied. There will always be a waiting time, a preparation time, a care-filled preparation time.
If we deny ourselves the opportunity to experience Advent longing, we will not recognize the gift of Christmas. If we skip the preparation, we will not be ready for the reality. If we ignore the bittersweetness of joy mixed with sorrow; life tinged with death, we will remain unaware of the powerful presence of the conjoined reality of life lived in the land of both.
Advent offers us that time. Advent is a month of memories filled with remembrances of good and bad, death and life, joy and sorrow, pain and pleasure. Advent memories linger to deepen our life and strengthen our living. Advent is our annual pilgrimage into the reality that we really do co-exist with and in “the problem of being alive in a deeply flawed yet stubbornly beautiful world.”
Advent is the way into Christmas living. It reminds us that we are both bearers of life and its midwives. We bring life where lifelessness looms large and we defy death with the power of our gift.
So, we end where we began. We can choose “the bittersweet tendency to states of longing, poignancy, and sorrow; an acute awareness of passing time; and a curiously piercing joy at the beauty of the world.” Or, we can opt to live less deeply.
A caveat remains: “Buyer beware of the choice and what it may bring.”
Fran Salone-Pelletier has a master’s degree in theology and is the author of “Awakening to God: The Sunday Readings in Our Lives” (a trilogy of Scriptural meditations), religious educator, retreat leader, lecturer and grandmother of four. She can be reached at hope5@atmc.net.
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