Rite and Reason: Advent, that season of waiting, when we are caught between memory and hope, is coming to an end, writes Anne Thurston.
We are on the eve of the winter solstice and almost on the eve of Christmas. The coincidence of the two festivals will not surprise many. In the Northern Hemisphere at least there is a deep connection in the imagination between the coming of the light and the "coming of the Light into the world", as the Gospel of St John proclaims.
Christianity has always baptised popular culture and assimilated pagan festivals. Some fortunate people will watch the sun rise in Newgrange; some of the rest of us may struggle to awaken and gradually let it dawn on us that this is the true turning of the year. The darkest, shortest days are over and we celebrate the waxing of the light.
Advent, now a submerged liturgical season, is the time of waiting. It has become increasingly counter-cultural as the Christmas extends its reach even as far back as October, colonising the dead days of November, and packing December with shopping and parties and considerable panic. As Dennis O'Driscoll comments wryly in his poem Non-Stop Christmas: "Christmas is always coming. There are only ever so many days still left."
Advent once had a similar penitential flavour to Lent, but that has long gone and it would be pointless to try to retrieve it. So we celebrate Christmas for the month of December and the lights and parties cheer the dull dark days. And, alongside the crazed consumerism, generous impulses abound. Students fast for the hungry and cards promising camels or goats sit on my mantelpiece, and it is a relief to know I won't have to tend them.
However, I do wonder whether the idea of Advent might not still have something to say to us and whether we might retrieve it less as a fixed period of time than as a dimension of time.
Advent within this Christmas season offers a sense of time, which is not about the headlong rush towards one day but which takes the longer perspective. It seems to have as much to do with death as with birth, with darkness as with light. Its span stretches further back and reaches further forward holding us in that tension between memory and hope. It is about an inner journey of transformation.
It is about a hope which insists, despite the darkness of the political as well as the natural landscape, that there will be light. It is about preparing to become hospitable to new birth even, or especially, when it comes in the most unlikely guise.
The need to hibernate or at least retreat from time to time in these dark weeks seems a very natural one. Anyone lucky enough to have attended one of the Advent carol services will have experienced the wonder of the darkened churches and the gradual lighting of candles.
This is such a very different light which does not dispel the darkness but illuminates it and leaves us with our shadows - a necessary part of the Advent experience. In this service all the symbols speak powerfully as we watch and wait and listen to mysterious and ancient readings, which tune us back to a tradition where the words are hollowed out with usage like ancient steps. As we are rushed onwards and reminded of only so many shopping hours, let alone days, to Christmas, we could decide to pull back, to resist the pressure and to stop. Would everything really fall apart if we walked by the sea for an hour, or even swam, as some hardy souls do, and not just on Christmas morning? We might look up and catch sight of the geese flying by for their winter feeding.
We might just look out the window at a winter-bare tree. We might catch our breath as the low December sunlight suddenly illuminates a hidden corner. What might happen if we slowed down rather than counted down? Might not our sanity be restored by taking an Advent breathing space?
There might then just be a chance that Advent expectation could put us in touch with our deepest longings as we hear the call to turn again. In these last days of the season in some churches and monasteries the great O Antiphons of Advent are recited or sung - the one for tomorrow's solstice being particularly appropriate:
O Oriens: O radiant Dawn, brightness of light eternal, and sun of all justice: O come and illumine those who live in deep darkness, in the shadow of death.
Anne Thurston is the author of A Time of Waiting: Images and Insights (Columba Press)