Advent in July

Every Monday this month, a group of us have met to celebrate Advent. Advent in July! Advent is as important a preparation for Christmas as Lent is for Easter. And yet, with all the gift buying, decorating, end-of-year parties and deadlines, Advent often gets as much of our attention as children give to their least favorite present. Take the advent wreath. I make a pledge every year to get it out and set up so I can begin Advent with the first Sunday, but never seem to get everything in place until almost 10 days later. While I do pray using my wreath, I can’t seem to do it every single day. By the third week, I am burning candles outside of my prayer times in an effort to get the candles to “look right.” Looking right means burning some of the candles so they are all the proper Advent length, with one short purple and one medium purple candle plus a rose candle that has to be taller than the medium one but shorter than the final, unburned purple candle. I can’t be the only one who does this, am I?

Advent, from the Latin Adventus, means coming. Advent itself is a time to recognize and celebrate the fact that we are always waiting, waiting for more to come. God created human beings such that we are never content with what “is,” but always desire more. We yearn, long, desire, strive, and yes, we wait for more to come. Ultimately and in its deepest, most fundamental sense, what we long for is to be with God, to join our limited, finite self with the infinite. Since this can only happen after our death, our longings in our day by day lives take on less lofty manifestations. But it is, nonetheless, in those everyday longings that we find our vocational calls, what we desire in our work and our relationships. Advent is a time set aside especially for us to touch these longings, to simply recognize and sit with the reality that life will never complete us, will never fully satiate us.

This, of course, is only half the story. If we are always an Advent people, longing for the coming of God in our hearts and lives, we are also always a Christmas people. God-(is)-with-us, Emmanuel! “Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them.” John 14:23. Though we are incomplete, we know God is already with us. God has made his home in us. When we are Advent-ing (to coin a term), we know that God is with us as we touch our deepest desires. The angst of our incompleteness is lessened with the felt knowledge of God transforming our hearts, our minds and our lives.

To Advent in July, we need only ask ourselves what we really long for, knowing God is with us even in what is incomplete.

A Fundamental Self-Consciousness

During a recent visit with my family, my Mom remarked that the day had been just about perfect. My brother and I were headed out for the evening, so we agreed with her and went back to our good-byes. A few days later, Mom asked me what had happened at that moment, feeling self-conscious that she had said something wrong. Of course, she’d said nothing disagreeable, but it got me thinking about how vulnerable we are to others, how the slightest remark can spin us into a flurry of self-doubt and weaken our self-confidence.

A popular approach, Evolutionary Psychology, seeks to explain how human emotion, thought, and behavior is tied to natural selection and the survival of our species through the ages. According to evolutionary psychologists, becoming self-conscious helped our ancestors to survive. With threats to survival ranging from animal attacks to dehydration during droughts, humans learned that the best way to survive was to be part of a group. Our social orientation today has roots in our ancestors’ survival, even leading us to become self-conscious with our own family and friends when we they don’t respond to us as we anticipate.

Feeling disconnected from others is excruciatingly painful and brings us face to face with our own limitations, finiteness and insignificance in this world. When this happens to me, knowing that my ancestors survived by being sociable does not make me feel any better. What does help me now are two things. First, I remember St. Augustine’s statement, “Our souls are restless, Lord, until they rest in you.” My restlessness and self-consciousness makes me human. Indeed, as Fr. Ron Rolheiser O.M.I. summarizes, our spirituality is a fundamental “dis-ease” with all that is finite about me and this world. That excruciating pain of feeling disconnected is God himself within me, giving me the desire for full and complete union that can not happen in my lifetime. It is hard to remember this when I am in pain, but when I do finally name my experience as my God-given restlessness, it takes some of the sting out and God seems to join me in my loneliness.

After I recognize and name my fundamental dis-ease, I know that if I move away from my own self and towards others, I will ultimately quell the heat of the fire within. I don’t always do it and I don’t always want to do it. But, when I do throw myself more wholeheartedly into serving others, helping others, being there for others, I start to forget myself and my restlessness with it. A theology of the cross tells us that our relationship with God is not just based on a vertical one-on-one between God and me. My relationship with God is also deepened by my horizontal relationship with other people. “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

As it turns out, sometimes, loving your neighbor also turns out to be the best way to love yourself.