Advent Praise, Poetry, or Prose

Advent, like Christmas, is sometimes like “...visions of sugar plums danced in their heads.” The two seasons present a similar thematic in our culture. There’s something about being nostalgic and almost dreamy about our thoughts, our gift giving, our holiday cards.

Quite possibly the darker the clouds, the more intense our fears, the more news of war and terrorism we hear, we find ourselves seeking more the consolation of nostalgia and the comfort of Christmases past. In one sense, such dreaming is normal in the face of our current human reality.

Advent is like all liturgical seasons: a time of praise, poetry, and prose. The community gathers to praise God in familiar lyrics and rhythms. Part of singing at liturgy and celebrating is always our history: the lyrics, the context of when we first learned them, and the multiple religious experiences which have shaped our lives. The words are familiar, the rhythms consoling, and together they are energizing to our spiritual life.

The praise of God which is the liturgy is the songs and hymns. It is the candles of Advent whether in our homes or in the Assembly. Our thoughts and prayer life are challenged by the varying colors of purples and blues. We are challenged and consoled by the seeming night while we wait for the light of the new morning which is Christ. Such is the primary “language” of Advent.

Praise in Poetry or Prose

The Sunday readings are the challenge between poetry and prose. We are engaged in the lyrical approach of Isaiah. The words of the Prophet are suggestive and invitational of various symbols and possibilities. We move from the exile and suffering of the Jewish people to the sure fidelity of God to his People.

The language is poetic, replete with descriptions of better times to come. We can almost dance through the words as the Lord gathers his People. High mountains and straight highways, succulent meals, overflowing streams easily suggest the overflow of the mercy of the Lord with his People.

We celebrate in these words a new time of the Kingdom. We are called to justice and peace. We hear these passionate words about “justice and peace [kissing]”. We hear of the poor being fed and the lame dancing and the blind seeing. These are the “serious” words of the Kingdom.

The new age of the Kingdom is about justice and peace, not as a pipedream, but as the reality and condition of God entering our human history.

Prose as the Reality

Advent suggests that our conversion is through praise and poetry to the prose of reality described for us as where we live. Advent is quick to move us to conversion and change of heart. If we are to be transformed in grace, we need to embrace a new reality. Isaiah’s metaphors move us to Paul’s Letter to the Romans last weekend about enduring encouragement for one another.

The bridge of poetry to prose in the spiritual life is compassion. “Compassion” in its history is a wonderful word. “Compassion” comes from the Latin “compatior”, which means to suffer with. More freely translated, compassion means to understand and carry another’s burden and suffering. Compassion is to suffer together – thus Paul’s endurance.

How often we’ve heard about Advent’s patient endurance coming to hope? To move fruitfully through Advent and Christmas, a believer needs to negotiate from dreams and lovely metaphors to the reality of compassion. Our hope is born not of escape from reality, but precisely of our fuller entry into our human history and relationships.

Advent and Christmas remind us that God entered definitively into our human history in Christ. Advent hoping is about the Incarnation. Christ’s birth to Mary is the laying aside of his divinity to embrace our humanity. The fact and prose of human life is the grounding of our hope in Christ.

Compassion as Kingdom

In this sense compassion is the prose of the Kingdom. It describes our human predicament and hope. Whether the metaphor is death to life, or darkness to light, or hunger to fullness, the journey and experience is human. The miracle of God-in-history is the divine embrace of the human in Christ.

Advent will soon bring us to Christmas. The Advent Emmanuel, God-with-us, is the call to enter the transformed humanity which Christ’s birth gives. Incarnation embraces our world of war, hunger, injustice. In that very moment, the darkness is transformed into peace, justice, and the full presence of Christ. In patient endurance we move to hope. Embrace the graced moment and be embraced by it.

CDH