AS ADVENT progresses, I have found myself lamenting the erosion of the more austere and penitential aspects of the season. The Advent Prose, Rorate Caeli (“Drop down, ye heavens, from above”), is a heartfelt prayer for relief from exile and desolation, building on prophetic passages about the sin of God’s people and the need for redemption.
Yet, while we often scold society for the excess and commercialisation of Christmas, our liturgical habits seem increasingly to mimic the secular. It is difficult, because schools and colleges want to mark the end of the autumn term with carol services and nativity plays, and churches follow them, with decorated Christmas trees in church, along with Advent wreaths and candles (a Lutheran import). The Children’s Society commends Christingle services, which are often held from the start of Advent, though the message of Christingle is more obviously suited to Epiphany.
I miss the keeping of Advent as a season of longing, a time in which we can express our bleakness, our disappointment, our grief that the world is not as it should be, and that our lives are not what they could be. As Rorate Caeli puts it, “We have sinned, and are as an unclean thing, and we all do fade as a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away.” Yet there is hope beyond the acknowledgement of our condition. Rorate Caeli ends with the words that begin the 40th chapter of Isaiah: “Comfort, comfort my people.”
Few will now remember the little series Cries of Advent, which the poet-priest Jim Cotter produced in 1989. It was based on the Great “O” Antiphons for the Magnificat, which are traditionally sung from 17 December (or the 16th in the Sarum Use); but he extended them back to the beginning of the month, and expanded them to reflect random cries of creation, including those of the salmon, the swallow, the lion, and those without a voice to cry with; all woven into a tapestry of longing for the one who is to come: the Christ who brings transformation and new life.
It is our loss that we no longer know how to wait and long. Society endorses our chronic impatience and encourages us to expect that our desires and demands will be met. The Advent call, though, is for our desires and demands to be challenged. We need to acknowledge that we are in the bleak midwinter before we get to Christmas.
Looking at the world as it is at the moment (Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan), the often corrupt and kleptocratic leadership of nations, the careless greed and grinding poverty of our time, and the burden of our carelessness on the natural world, let alone the personal griefs and sadnesses that we endure, the Advent cry really is a cry for mercy and salvation. Comfort my people.
