EXPECTATION AND NARRATIVE: REFLECTIONS ON ADVENT

Courtesy of UMC Resources.

Advent is a paradox. The word means both arrival - an event - and coming - a process. 

Here’s one way to look at that doubleness. We know how the story goes: our Savior came into the world, suddenly and in the most unexpected of places. Our preparation during Advent for the nativity celebrated at Christmas takes a new form each year as our circumstances change. This year, Advent will be marked by a return to remote worship in my parish, the doors of our church closed once more as the pandemic surges back unrelentingly. Still, the joy of Christmas is fervently desired whether we can celebrate it in person or not. And desire, like a journey, is a process, reaching out from us to its object.

There is, however, a second arrival Advent marks. We know how the story goes: Christ will come again in glory to inaugurate the kingdom of God. We prepare for this through prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. We look to the world and to our own lives and consider their brokenness as well as the vivid possibilities for healing and reconciliation lying at the periphery of our sight – possibilities we turn our gaze from all too often. These possibilities, too, are always changing. Here again, we have a second pairing of an event of arrival and a process of coming, of journeying toward it.

Contained within this beautiful season of longing, then, is a narrative, with beginning, middle, and end. That is how event and process can coincide: in narrative. 

Yet once we grasp this narrative structure, the paradox of Advent returns in a new form. The story is always, always the same. Each year we rehearse the narrative, with joy and expectation, contrition and wonder, mingling. Won’t we get bored of this story? Aren’t we already?

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A powerful and underappreciated aspect of modern life is the dominance of the idea that our own lives are stories that we compose. 

You may be wondering if this idea is really modern. The most salient apparent counterexample from the ancient world is Augustine’s Confessions – at once a prayer, a public relations campaign, an elegant literary text, and an accounting of the events of Augustine’s life.

Readers of the Confessions, however, must confront two ruptures in the text: first, what starts out as a narrative focused purely on Augustine’s life opens up to include biographical vignettes of his companions and his mother Monica; and second, the abrupt shift from this biographical and narrative mode to philosophical and theological investigation in the last four books. 

While it would take a deeper analysis to prove it, these discontinuities suggest an implicit thought behind the writing of the Confessions itself: Augustine wants his readers to see, precisely, that he is not the author of his own story. All these ruptures in the narrative point to God, who has written the story of Augustine’s life - indeed, all our lives - before we were born.

The idea that we are not the makers of ourselves, not the authors of our own stories, was not confined to the Christian imagination. In ancient Greek philosophy (and in its many afterlives in the Roman, Islamic, and medieval European worlds), it was largely unquestioned that human beings have an ultimate end or goal that confers value on our pursuits and in light of which we ought to organize our lives. Stories do not obey this sort of teleological structure, still less the stories we tell about ourselves. 

Very crudely speaking, with the rise of anthropologies that center on autonomy came the possibility of seeing ourselves as unbound by values we do not freely choose. Such freedom has also increasingly meant creative or artistic license. If there is no simple objective truth about who we are, then to be anything is to make ourselves, and, as story-telling creatures, our tendency is to fashion narratives about who we are now, who we have been, and why things happen to us.

In pointing to the historical and contingent origins of this way of thinking, I am not trying to debunk it. We simply find ourselves confronted with the task of making sense of ourselves with the cultural tools we possess. The question I want to ask is this: What would it mean to be truthful about the stories we tell? I will explore this question in order to understand how we should relate to the narrative of Advent and the liturgical year generally.

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One of the chief dangers to truth in this matter is what we may call progressive narratives, those that frame our lives as proceeding in linear fashion from stage to stage and through which we see ourselves borne ceaselessly forward. 

After all, it is easy to see the big moments in life - a promotion at work, an engagement or a wedding, even a vacation we’ve saved up for - as the events toward which our lives were aimed all along. 

When things seem more or less the same after these milestone events, as they tend to do, it is hard to avoid a sense of alienation or ennui. Are these events by themselves really what life is all about? Everyday experience, by contrast, seldom feels saturated with value, even as we meet with ordinary joys and sorrows. 

But when we look back, patterns and contours tend to emerge that we could not see from the vantage of what was then simply the mundane present. A friendship, for instance, is experienced largely in particular moments, none of which need be especially significant, but which form a totality that gives real meaning to our lives. A career, likewise, is not a ladder of ascending rungs, but a span of time spent in work, which, if we are lucky, can be a source of pride. These examples show that the processes matter just as much as the events.

In fact, if all our loves and labors got their meaning from discrete moments of culmination, then the inevitable disappointments - when that culmination does not occur or does not occur as or when we would wish - would cut much deeper. And all the rest of our lives would start to feel meaningless. But we need not always look to the future - the next milestone - to find the point of what we are doing. Everyday life is life, after all.

A more truthful narrative about ourselves will acknowledge this fact. It will also acknowledge the sheer messiness of life, the steps backward as well as forward, the confusion, the delightful and terrifying fact that we often discover what we mean to be doing in doing it. 

In fact, no one narrative could contain all these aspects. No single story of our own devising will be adequate to what we experience.

Questions of truthfulness, narrative, and the shape of our lives are accessible from a wide variety of moral and religious perspectives. But they have a special resonance for those of us confronted by the puzzle I began with: the paradox presented by Advent - and indeed the whole liturgical year - with its essentially repetitive form. 

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Last Epiphany, shortly after we fell in love, my wife fretted to me that our entry into Ordinary Time would mean a lapse into something quotidian just as the world had come to seem transformed for us. I had never thought of Ordinary Time this way. In fact, I had never felt the rhythms of the liturgical year as part of my life before, only as an external force that had shaped my experiences as a churchgoer. The thought stayed with me as we moved into Lent, as Easter both came and seemed not to come, and then in the long season after Pentecost, a most welcome stretch of Ordinary Time.

Ordinary Time, of course, is not literally ordinary, but simply ordered, incremental. But the difference between Ordinary Time and the great seasons of Advent-Christmas and Lent-Easter is nevertheless instructive. Just as each season has its own narrative coherence, the narrative told by the liturgical year likewise forms a single story, which is, in its totality, the Christian story. Ordinary Time affords us the opportunity to find our own place in relation to that story, as we confront, each year, its sheer momentousness. 

More importantly, the cyclical character of liturgical time - the repetition it demands of us - has the tendency to dissuade us from becoming too attached to any particular story we want to tell about our own lives. The great narrative of the liturgical year overwhelms the partial narratives we prefer, so that we are forced to look again at the details of our lives in new light. 

But this light, the light of truth, is not cold and forensic. For what so often goes unseen in ourselves and in those around us is the loveliness of the ordinary, the particular, the contingent, when it is set free of the demands of worldly success and its associated narratives. These truths are better known and more easily acknowledged when we recognize that we are not in fact the authors of ourselves.  

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Of course, this Advent, this holy season of preparation is unlike that any of us has faced before. I don’t know what it all means. But I know what I must do: watch, wait, hope.