There is a tiny, sour, hyper-materialist atheist who lives in a corner of my brain, and of all the things she hates about religion, Advent is the worst.
Christmas? Fine. Sing songs, put up goofy decorations, and tell a story with baby animals added for effect—you can’t blame people for distracting themselves from the cold and dark of winter.
But Advent—all this talk of being patient, and these abstractions: hope, peace, joy, love—it’s everything that drives my tiny atheist to tantrums. Escapism, she charges; four weeks of nothing, pretending to be something. People trying to convince themselves things are okay when they aren’t. And the waiting—just useless, helpless inaction while the bad guys go on winning.
And this year, of all the years, as refugee camps spring up outside U.S. borders and child detention camps grow within them, I have to admit: to pretend I know anything of waiting would be to make a mockery of someone else’s silent nights.
I’m not much of a 2 Peter person. I’d much rather make fun of fire-and-brimstone sermons than read one out of my own Bible. Since I quit reading the Left Behind series around age 13, I don’t know what to make of this thief-in-the-night business. I don’t spend much time anticipating the second coming of our Lord, not even during Advent.
But here is 2 Peter 3 in the middle of my reading for the season. As I vacillate between Christmas cheer and moral outrage, this passage that seems neither here nor there; neither Hallmark Channel nor protest song, it’s a supernatural action flick dropped in the middle of felt-calendar season.
Then again, the language seems less strange and less dangerous if I read this passage as if it were the first century, as if my land is under occupation and I belong to a fringe religious sect. I feel myself being swept along by depictions of the fiery end of the earth, refining the world and revealing the truth at the core of things: the new heaven and the new earth. I feel myself ready, so ready for this revolution, for the pain and fear surrounding me to just burn itself up in one great flash so new things can grow. When I imagine that day, it seems like anything is possible. It can’t get here fast enough.
And what does the author say to do? In the midst of lurid visions of the end of days, the exasperating message: Wait. “Live holy and godly lives as you look forward to the day of God and speed its coming.”
I’m ready to go kick down doors and lay claim to justice, or become some radical missionary proclaiming the good news of the fiery heavens, or move to some mountaintop and pray 24/7, but this guy’s advice is to “be on your guard…grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”
Useless, helpless inaction: the tiny atheist growls.
If indifference is one of the chief failings of people with privilege, its seductive shadow side is impatience. We’re liable to kick down doors without much thought for who’s going to put them back up.
When my white (or wealthy, or male) friends and I learn that a problem exists, we expect that as with most of our personal problems, we will quickly find a solution and bend the world to our will that the issue be fixed. Trained all our lives to be Leaders and Achievers and Problem-Solvers, we splash into the middle of complex issues that don’t directly affect our day-to-day lives, often making the Problem worse.
It takes a long time (or a huge disaster) to fully understand our Helping as masked superiority; our Leadership Skills as assumptions that work in only one cultural context and power dynamic; our need to fix as a need to control, and not confront, the world’s pain.
A desire to make a problem go away is very different from a commitment to being formed in the way of justice. The former is a project. The latter is an undoing. The former requires being right. The latter requires humility.
To be honest, all the people trying to instill compassion in me as a child were not doing particularly difficult work. I think compassion is human, and especially easy for children. Instead, I wish someone had invited me earlier to humility.
Now, when it is pointed out to me how my attitude or behavior is making a situation worse, I’m likely to sputter, well, did you want me to sit and do nothing? I am the one who can hardly bear to receive the compassion behind the hard and gentle word, yes.
In 2018 I began learning to sit and do nothing—I took up trying to meditate. It’s the opposite of my achieving tendencies. In the past I’ve tried to meditate and given up; I suppose I thought that “anything worth doing is worth doing well” and decided to put off an encounter with myself, the universe, and God until I was fully prepared.
Only this year did it occur to me that if your goal is truly to sit and to nothing, the only way you can fail is to give up and go back to rushing around, chasing things you already have.
By sitting and doing nothing, I am learning the humility of waiting. To encounter the world’s pain from a place of grounding in our belovedness—instead of piling onto it with my need to make it go away.
I am discovering I’ve never known how to listen before, and allowing myself to truly hear others in new ways.
I am leaving the world in God’s hands and waiting for the particular calling of my one small life.
I am believing when others tell their own stories, and echoing their calls for better systems and structures.
I am sitting still with Love, love even for the parts of me that refuse to believe in it.
And I am discovering that to “grow in the grace and knowledge of Jesus Christ” is the hardest and most essential work that can be done—more earth-changing and less visible, more beautiful and less measurable than any project, or even any revolution, has ever been. It is work that does not give up hoping for a new heaven and a new earth, but also knows they will emerge when this raggedy old world is transformed by love. Love for what is, not just what could be. Love that humbly learns from the lowly. Love that is fierce, but also patient, drawing strength from stillness.
And so this year, of all the years, I have to admit that hope and peace and joy and love, in this moment, look like waiting.
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