I arrived late at the Advent Carol service this year, having misjudged how long it would take to walk to church from the house we moved to a month ago. My confident assumption that I could easily walk it in 30 minutes turned out not to be true in the dark and rain when I’d stopped on the way to tell my son where I was going and what my absence from the house at 6pm meant for tea. My attempt to slip in quietly at the back was then foiled first by the Priory’s heavy wooden door and noisy latch, and second by the fact that the choir were leading congregational singing for ‘O come, o come Emmanuel’ from the back. So I stood rather awkwardly just inside the door, breathing heavily from rushing uphill and with the rain dripping from my coat, waiting for them to process to the front so I could grab a candle and order of service and find a seat. By the time we were into the first reading I was a bit more settled, but it wasn’t how I’d wanted to enter worship.
It’s more than slightly symbolic of the way I have entered Advent this year – off-balance, unprepared, and with my heart and mind on other things. Perhaps it’s been to do with a sometimes overwhelmingly difficult news cycle, where it’s sometimes felt like every day has brought more unsettling stories, and you’re left looking at bleak headlines on your phone deciding whether clicking through to the story and reading the details or not doing it and imagining what they might be is the better choice. Perhaps it’s been about moving house in a half term that ended up falling two thirds of the way through the year, leaving me scrambling to catch up before term ran out. However it’s happened, this year I’ve drifted into Advent unprepared, as if I’d stumbled into a party feeling underdressed and with the guilty feeling I should have brought something for the host. After all, I’m ordained. I teach Anglicanism at a theological college. Being surprised by your own liturgical year seems a bit embarrassing.
As I sat in the pew, listening to the choir sing an anthem and waiting for my heart rate to slowly settle down again, it began to dawn on me that this is precisely what Advent is for – to catch us in the middle of the everything else that is going on in our hearts and minds and slowly, gently, bring us back to ourselves. To remind us where we are and what’s really going on when we’re living too much in the maze of a dread-filled past or a fear-ridden future. To acknowledge our failures to meet our own expectations, let alone anyone else’s. But not to leave us there.
Advent is a penitential season, but it’s also one tinged with anticipation. And hope. The hope that something better than we could ask or imagine is out there. That in the midst of our fears and failings we will be met by one who understands them, but wants us to step beyond them into a future we have been promised but find hard to trust in. Advent is a season of preparation, slowly calming us from our insecurities and strengthening the muscles of our hope, so that when Christ comes to us we will dare to let him take us by the hand and lead us on.