WHEN I worked at a university, Covid restrictions meant that we were not permitted to sit close to one another for the college photo. Instead, a drone was brought in. As we stood there, impressively socially distanced, it took off with such noise and wind force that we looked like the opening sequence of Father Ted with everyone struggling to stay upright.
The hardest part was smiling for the photograph. The drone took its time, and most of us were perhaps replicating the disciples on Ascension Day, looking up with blinking faces. One of my don colleagues got a bit frustrated: “Hurry up, you bloody thing!” he swore, waving his fist at the sky. “I’m losing my sincerity.”
AS THE weeks of Advent draw to a close, “Hurry up! I’m losing my sincerity” might be the prayer in many hearts, and not just those of the clergy who have sat through too many carol services. Advent is the season that demands of us an unusual degree of self-recognition and honesty, and some sincerity with God, as we acknowledge that we are not, after all, complete within ourselves. Contrary to a lot of self-help therapy, the truth is that human beings can be made whole only from outside of themselves. A human life is complete when we know we are not alone, and when we are loved beyond our belief or sense of worth.
Advent is, therefore, also the season of the Church’s year that is voiced in the vocative — crying out, reaching out, looking out for help. You hear it in the “O”s of Advent. Their prayer is a cry in the dark: “O God, O Key to my life, O Saviour of my imperfection: come, come to us, come and judge us, tell us who we are, who we have become, so we can all admit it and look to be changed.
“Make us alert so we can stand before you, spiritually naked, ready now to be clothed by something warmer. We are fractured: come and make us integrated. We are injured: come and soothe. We are cruel, selfish monsters: so come and challenge us. We are distracted and not distilled: come and repair. We are human, make us humane. Come and tell us your promises again so that we can become more promising, because without you, we are our own worst enemies, and will destroy the things we love: our communities and churches, our loved ones, our currency of trust, our deepest selves, and even the planet you gifted us.”
“We do not fear you because you are frightening,” prays Advent, “but because you are real, and we, so much of the time, are not, because we are proudly hiding. It is only by exposing our lives of messy straw that we make ourselves ready for you to be laid there: the first glimpse of Love, the one who throws light into my darkness.”
ADVENT is a short season. It seems to know that we cannot keep up this honesty for long. We feel too vulnerable and exposed. We will need another round of self-scrutiny when Lent comes along. When I worked in Denmark, I once went to a seminar on geo-politics led by an eminent diplomat from the Middle East. Someone asked about Britain’s attitude to whatever the topic was we were discussing. “Ah, the British,” the diplomat said. “Well, they like to say the sun never sets on their empire. But that is only because God doesn’t trust them in the dark.”
In the days of Advent, we enter into the darkness cast by our own shadows, and we pray that God will be able to trust us as we try to stay authentic, transparent, and open to the necessary amendments in our lives that the gospel joyfully demands of us. Today, there is so much distraction and pressure to pursue the enviable life rather than the good life that God might well see us wobble and slip back into our old templates for living. We know that a proud humanity can be saved only by a humble God, but — please — hurry up! We are losing our sincerity.
THE human encounter with truth in Advent’s prayers and carols is like the experience of being shipwrecked: tossed out of vessels we’ve settled into and been happy to be a passenger in for a while; finding ourselves in new, unexplored places that may feel sad, dangerous, or simply uninhabitable.
The image we reach for to explore these Advent ruptures in our hearts and behaviours might be the beachcomber, drifting somewhere between the oceanic depths of God and the richness and adventure of life as gift, and the rocky realities of life ashore — perhaps in a jungle, or on a clifftop, often lonely, where we pitch ourselves precariously and with a vulnerability that is unnerving.
As Advent night gives way to Christmas dawn, there is enough light to see that the coastline runs between mystery and mayhem, or, in Thomas Hardy’s words, between “the wonder and the wormwood of the whole”. Ours may be the language of the shipwrecked, but that does not mean that we are hopeless — quite the opposite. One now comes to pitch his tent with us, building a new dwelling on our island; drawing us so near to him that together we imagine a kingdom — a kingdom of God, even; inviting us to see the horizons of possibility.
THERE is a difference between losing things and getting lost. Losing things involves a falling away of stuff we have accumulated and of masks that no longer work. Getting lost opens the way to a discovery of the new and the as yet unexperienced. It happens when God moves in next to us and unsettles our settlements.
Incarnation asks us not to lose sight of what Advent revealed to us of ourselves, and tasks us with finding the will and the energy to love in a world freshly comprehended and graced.
To live and pray with the language of the shipwrecked is difficult but, as we see in Advent, and as Shakespeare shows us in The Tempest, sometimes the language of the shipwrecked is the most beautiful and compelling of all. We must first acknowledge the “darkness [that is] mine”; but then, in the light that comes to dispel it, we see the beautiful reality that “What’s past is prologue.”
The Very Revd Dr Mark Oakley is the Dean of Southwark, and Whitelands Professorial Fellow at Roehampton University.
