Being patient
Fr Lawrence Lew O.P.
As I was listening to this podcast about Advent from the wonderful Sisters of Life in the Bronx, a couple of my 6th Form students asked me to contribute to a video they are making about the importance of patience, all of which has got me thinking.
We live in a curious age which is marked both by instant gratification and the promotion of Christmas in early November. We are encouraged by the big media companies to buy now, now, now because their deals just can’t wait. Oh yes, and don’t forget (they say) to buy for an event that’s still weeks off as well because… well, because we just want your money.
Delayed gratification is increasingly counter-cultural which means that Advent simply doesn’t make much sense for many people any more. But Advent is a wonderful season. A season of preparation. A season of reflection. And a season of patient waiting.
Why do we wait? Part of the answer is because God waited for us. There is a fantastic passage in Ronald Knox’s The Creed in Slow Motion in which he reminds us that:
Our Lord … wanted the whole of his merciful design for our redemption to unroll itself gradually before our eyes, like a kind of slow-motion picture; never hurrying, never giving us the opportunity of saying, “Stop a minute, I haven’t quite taken that in yet.” He wouldn’t just come to earth, he would spend thirty-three years on earth. He wouldn't just appear suddenly and scatter miracles over the countryside in the course of an afternoon; he would spend three years going about and doing good. He wouldn’t just die for us; he would hang there, three whole hours, on the Cross, so that we could watch him and take it all in. And he wouldn’t just die and rise again; he would spend part of three days in the tomb … Nothing impresses us so much, when we read the account of God's dealings with his creation, either in science or in history, as the majestic slowness of his movements. And God made Man did not lose the characteristics of Godhead; he went to work very slowly, for all the world to see that he was God.
If ever there was a passage worth reading slowly, it’s that one.
We live in a world whose tempo is set by business and technology rather than by nature or the Church. As French philosopher, Gilles Lipovetsky, puts it:
The modern obsession with time is no longer given concrete form merely in the sphere of work, submitted as it is to the criteria of productivity: it has extended into every aspect of life. Hypermodern society appears as the society in which time is increasingly experienced as a major preoccupation, one in which an increasing pressure on time is exerted in ever wider ways.
It is, therefore, really hard for us (and for our children) to slow down, to wait, to accept that God’s time is not the same as our time. But perhaps there is no better time to learn that lesson than during Advent. Picking up on what the Sisters of Life said in their podcast, we might say that what we are given at Advent is a promise not a procedure, and, ultimately, not just a promise but a person: Jesus Christ himself. That is why we wait during Advent. Because we’re expecting someone very special.
And this waiting is like no other wait because, as the historian François Hartog reminds us:
In regards relations to time, Christianity’s specific contribution was the decisive event of the Incarnation – the birth, death, and resurrection of the Son of God made man – which broke time in two. A new time started, which was to end with a second and last event, the Second Coming of Christ and the Last Judgment. The in-between time was a time of anticipation: a present inhabited by the promise of the end.
During Advent we are waiting for a person, Jesus Christ, who has already arrived and we are also waiting for that same person to come again. During Advent we prepare for Christmas and for the Second Coming. That is why it’s such a great season.
And it is important to remember that it is a season. Commercial Christmas is such a disappointment because there is a huge build up to one day’s worth of over-indulgence. But Christmas, like Easter, isn’t a day trip. It’s a long holiday. Our feast continues throughout the strangely secular fast that January has become.
In other words, as I try to explain to my students, being patient at this time of year isn’t a trial. It makes perfect sense.