Anticipating Newness:  An Advent Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

Once they’ve rejected resignation, humans gain the privilege of making humanity their footpath.  Kouta Hirano

Anticipation is a gift. Perhaps there is none greater. Anticipation is born of hope. Indeed it is hope’s finest expression.  Steven L. Peck

So many of us grow into doubting, hopeless, callous adults protecting hardened hearts. Medicating the pain. Life isn’t what we imagined. Nor are we.  Charles Martin

One who is fed on promises feeds from an empty bowl.  Marsha Hinds

What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.   Henry David Thoreau

You should seek answers, although it is better to anticipate some, to be the light and dream. Dejan Stojanovic

For unhappiness has nothing to teach, and resignation is ugly.   Françoise Sagan

As we close this long chapter of weekly posts in anticipation of less frequent but perhaps more impactful contributions, there is much to reflect upon, much to give thanks for.  While the audience for these posts has declined in recent times – a sign perhaps of a voice that has become tiresome and even redundant – I am so grateful to all of you who have dipped your toes in the water we have collected over many years, water which hopefully has helped to nourish both the day to day of this edgy world and that also anticipates a world that is on a path to become cleaner, fairer and greener, one more conducive to the health and well-being of our collective progeny.

I began these weekly posts several years ago in Advent and I will end them with Advent as well.  For those located (or stuck) within the Christian tradition, Advent is perhaps the most neglected of our ecclesial seasons.  We are so anxious to get to Christmas that we utterly fail this season of preparation, of discernment, even of longing.  We too often ignore the value in anticipation of a world in which human and divine converge, where a vast universe of creation deigns to shine its light on our relatively tiny planet and its equally tiny pursuits, light which emanated from the stars long before the dawn of the human age.  The light was there before we were, before our species embarked on this long journey – one clever in large measure but less so in wisdom – a species which now seems alternately passionate about renewal and resigned to what, in some key sectors of human existence at least, has become a precipitous and even ugly decline. 

This pervasive and creeping resignation is why Advent still matters, perhaps matters as much as the holiday season of incarnation to which it is attached, that holiday towards which we drive much too recklessly and certainly over the speed limit.   For how can we fully grasp the significance of the Christmas incarnation – of God with us (if you are able to accompany me there), and thus of a world that can be more than we have imagined it being — if we bypass the anticipatory stage to which it is rightly tethered?  How do we make full sense of a season which has become captive in too many instances of addictive consumption and awkward reunions around a dinner table without also sitting in contemplation of all that is in danger of being lost from life now, and all that could be if we were truly and fully engaged in the task of making it so, indeed if we still believed that such a world is possible?

The anticipation associated with this season is not to be confused with wishful thinking or an excuse to avoid the localized affairs which constitute so much of daily living.  Yes, the universe is vast beyond belief; yes, we are being called to discern more, to abandon resignation and embrace a kinder, fairer scale of possibility.  And yet, there are also diapers to change, wood and water to gather, children and elderly to protect and reassure, bills to pay, dishes to wash, bathrooms to clean, rice to harvest and cook.  On and on it goes, practical responsibilities that force our attention and focus our energy, the many details of responsible living which for many of us are challenging enough all year round, let alone as Christmas approaches, a logistical burden such that this seasonal call of the universe to us – this call of the divine if you will – cannot easily be heard let alone heeded. 

And yet we cannot escape the fact It is anticipation in its best sense that is the glue that literally holds this time of Advent and incarnation and its myriad details together, giving it a full meaning.  Theologians including Paul Tillich understood that to anticipate is to enable the energy of what our hearts long for to directly influence our thoughts and actions, to begin in essence to live in us as though the promise we anticipate is actually on its way, or more precisely is in some way already a living force within us, if not quite yet at its final landing spot. 

We don’t have to look far to see this insight in action.  The woman for whom an engagement ring is a symbol which allows her to anticipate and even map out the contours of a long life with another.  The child anticipating a bicycle for Christmas that is not so much about the object itself but about the future ability to ride through the parks and around the neighborhood.  The farmer attending to the question of to whom to sell and/or give his/her harvested crop while that crop is still months from its full ripeness. 

We know how to do anticipation.  We have experienced some of the effects of longings which have already taken up space in our hearts.  But it is so difficult now to capture this one, unique Advent longing as the logistics of the Christmas holiday drown out the promise of an Advent season that strives to beam hope into lives that, in too many instances, have largely short-circuited their hopeful connection.

But we must be clear: The problem we face now is more than logistical, more than ensuring that our personal effects are in order or that our laws and (in the case of the UN) resolutions are properly framed.  The problem now is in part that so many of us seem resigned to our current slide.  Many of us, including in our own policy sector, seem to be giving up on the possibility that climate change and species extinction can be reversed, that nations can replace enmity with trust, that the vast inequalities of wealth and power can revert to the mean, that our vast expenditures on coercive security measures can be diverted to solving problems that are still within our capacity to solve, that our communities and families can do better than building walls and shunning diversity.

Collectively, we are indeed increasingly in a resignation frame of mind.  We are increasingly suspicious of everything and everyone save for ourselves. But we are in some ways, if the sages and psychologists are on point, also desperate to be rescued from smug and callous versions of ourselves. Sadly our faith communities are simply not doing enough to reverse this toxic course.  This applies as well, perhaps especially, to my own Christian faith, one which should stake its claim fully on anticipation rather than resignation, at least if the core of Advent is to be believed.

In this regard, I am reminded of an old professor of mine at Yale, Jaroslav Pelikan, who used to refer to a Christian faith characterized by “pessimism about life and optimism about God.”  What this meant was that there buried deep within an otherwise hopeful faith is a resignation about ever having the world we might want, a world that is more than a snare and temptation to sin, a world envisioned by agreements like the UN Sustainable Development goals, but even more by the promise of incarnation — coming and already here –; a promise that is much more than an “empty bowl,” a promise to both honor and answer the vastness of a universe almost beyond comprehension, vastness which might otherwise make us despair of ever mattering in anything approximating the grand scheme of things. But the Advent promise reminds us that we matter anyway.  The world matters anyway. We matter to each other anyway. 

Mattering, perhaps, does not seem like a particularly high bar to many of you, but ours is a bar that has been slipping for some time and is now sliding lower still, a bar that needs so desperately to be repositioned such that it can inspire us to live out our lives in the light of the world we anticipate, to place our energies, talents and aspirations out where the light of a divine universe can shine upon them. We need to recover that place which confirms that a better world is possible, indeed that such a world is poised to appear if only we would consent to the “privilege of making humanity our footpath,” pledging to do at least our part to both anticipate the coming of a kinder, gentler, healthier planet and ensure its safe passage.

For the past six years, one Sunday after another, these missives have been devoted to that Advent spirit, one which eschews the temptations of inattentiveness, logistical chaos, personal resignation and, yes, of hardened hearts, one which attempts to inspire institutions large and small to keep the promises they make and, more particularly, that splendid promise of a world which has managed to come back from the brink, a world filled with people from all regions and backgrounds who have also found a way in this time of indifference, poverty and pandemic to come back from brinks of their own. For our part, we continue to live in anticipation of a world fit to sustain the lives of children, a world of doors not walls, a world of modest lifestyles and ambitious generosity, a world striving to bury every metaphorical hatchet — from hate speech to weapons of mass destruction.

For all our partial achievements and palpable failures over many years, this is what we continue to anticipate; this is what has been and remains alive in us; this is what we will do our best to grow and sustain until we meet again.

Tags: Advent, Anticipation, resignation