In her book Bittersweet: How Longing and Sorrow Make Us, Susan Cain highlights a certain two-sided dimension of human life, the paradox of what it means to be a human living in a good but broken world. She writes that “the tragedy of life is linked inescapably with its splendor; you could tear civilization down and rebuild it from scratch, and the same dualities would rise again” (xxiii). We can’t conceive of full human life in the world in which we live without some kind of sadness.
Cain adds that “to fully inhabit these dualities—the dark as well as the light—is, paradoxically, the only way to transcend them. And transcending them is the point. The bittersweet is about the desire for communion, the wish to go home” (xxiii). This longing for home, for oneness, is dredged up from the bottom of our hearts in the season of Advent.
This time, this stretch of weeks with a definite purpose, holds together both the sadness and yearning of the human experience alongside the expectation and hope that light the way. It brings together longing and fulfillment, rose and thorn.
During Advent, we put words and songs to the longing for communion with God, as we simultaneously look backward to Christ’s first coming, and forward to his coming again. Christmas is the celebration of both, and Advent prepares us for it.
Without Advent, Christians may be tempted to jettison either the longing or the hope in the Christian life. For folks who are prone to melancholia, Advent reminds us that our longing and yearning end in Christ. He has come and will come again. There is light at the end of the tunnel, joy on the other side of death.
But I suspect for most American Christians, the temptation is rather toward the other side. For them the tendency might be to inhabit an overly realized eschatology in which longing is muted and it’s all joy and fulfillment all of the time.
This is the story of contemporary consumer culture, in which, hard on the heels of Halloween, shops are decked and ready for Christmas. There is no longing or preparation, just hopping from holiday to holiday, from celebration to celebration.
The desire to skip over everything but the best bits in our culture can filter its way into the church, where we might feel pressure to emphasize only the fulfillment and affirmation that Christ gives, rather than grappling with the longing we still feel while we wait for his coming again.
The late Eugene Peterson seems to have recognized this tendency in American Christianity even decades ago. His life and work plotted a different course, one that chimed with Advent, and modeled “a long obedience in the same direction.”
A friend and local pastor, the Rev. Ben Wheeler, drew my attention to a letter that Peterson wrote to his son about the overly saccharine spirituality that sometimes comes to dominate American Christianity.
In the posthumously published Letters to a Young Pastor: Timothy Conversation Between Father and Son, Peterson writes about a trip to Tyler, Texas (where I now serve). He was there to speak to a gathering of pastors about his translation of the Bible, The Message. He tells his son that he was warmly received by all of them,
But they were also full of clichés and self-satisfaction at being in such a Christian town and state, with such a Christian president presiding over the world just now. After all these years, I realize that I have never been immersed in such a total Bible Belt world. All the glossy women looked the same; all the pastors sounded the same. The bookstore that the manager was so proud of was very large, with extensive holdings of every kind of CD, tape, and music publication, vast displays of Christian-romance fiction, a huge gallery of Thomas Kinkade. (80)
Peterson laments, “Why am I so uncomfortable in this world? They are all on my side; they are all courteous and affirmative, but it seems to be a gospel without depth, without suffering, without ambiguity. Everything smoothed out and ironed, and with a lot of starch in the collar. Why don’t I ever fit?” (80). Peterson’s feeling came from the sense that this form of Christianity didn’t grapple with the whole of life. It felt like Easter without Lent, Christmas without Advent.
Advent is a good reminder that the Christian faith is about all of life. The suffering matters as much as the joy. The cross is the door to resurrection.
This is why it’s so vital that we keep Advent. It is a reminder that we have hope and joy in Christ’s coming, but we long and yearn because that final coming is still far off. Christmas comes, but Christmas is always about Christ’s coming again to judge the living and the dead, to make things right. Every fulfillment we feel along the way still has that longing in it.
This is a salutary lesson for us as Christians, one that keeps us from either triumphalism or despair. But it is also a testimony to our neighbors, that the longing they feel leading up to Christmas is only fulfilled in Christ. He has come and he will come again.
The Rev. Dr. Cole Hartin is an associate rector of Christ Church in Tyler, Texas, where he lives with his wife and four sons.
