Advent Sunday

 

Advent is the Season of Preparation, of getting ready, not, primarily, to celebrate Christmas, but to get in shape for Jesus’ return, at some unknown future point. Because – like him – we have a body, it is in our bodies that we get ready. There are parallels here with intentionally doing exercises that strengthen your core in middle age, so that you might have greater mobility in an older age that as yet lies over the horizon. Advent is working on our core so that, when Christ comes again, we might be able to put on our own socks and shoes and follow him. And this year, the theme chosen by the Church of England for Advent is Calm & Bright.

Your body has a sympathetic nervous system, which helps keep us alive. The base of our brain scans for danger, and, through the release of certain hormones, our body prepares to respond. Are we strong enough to defend ourselves? Fight. Are we fast enough to outrun the danger? Flight. Is it better to remain as silent and still as possible, in the hope we will go unnoticed? Freeze. Or is our best chance the calculated risk of submission? Fawn.

The sympathetic nervous system helps keep us alive, but it takes its toll on our body. Once the immediate danger is past, we need to return to a state of calm. This is where our parasympathetic nervous system comes in, releasing other hormones that do just that. This also helps keep us alive, as a species, by enabling us to enjoy eating and experience sexual pleasure, and is sometimes referred to as Rest & Digest, or Feed & Breed.

But our sympathetic nervous system can be tricked into being permanently switched on. The base of our brain cannot tell the difference between your living in a building that is being shelled, and you watching a constant stream of images of buildings in another part of the world that are being shelled. And when our body is continually on high alert, we will experience migraines, or irritable bowels, or skin conditions.

The digitally saturated world we live in is especially bad in this regard. So, we try to fight back by tricking our parasympathetic nervous system into calming us. Again, we might turn to digital hits of affirmation. But the relaxing hormones have less and less impact, the more we force them.

None of this is new. In the threat-laden world of the first century, Paul wrote of experiencing joy and love – and cardio exercise – in an unstable context. His sometime travel companion, Luke, recorded Jesus also speaking of cardio exercise in contrast to numbing oneself, throughdrunkenness and dissipation, in the face of times of great and prolongeddistress.

The people of faith have always embraced disciplines that prepare themselves both for danger and for return to calm. This Advent, we are invited to discover, again, some of those calming practices. It is unlikely that the return of Jesus – a cataclysmic event – is about to take place. How can we remain fit and well as we wait?

Get outside, in nature, and go for a walk. Or get your hands dirty in the soil. Write in a journal, or a letter to a friend, or spend time with companions. Read a novel, play a game, or do a jigsaw. Meditate on the Psalms, or memorise a prayer, or receive Communion regularly. Stroke the ears of a pet. Sit and breathe deeply for five minutes, attending to your breath. Light candles. Listen to music. Appreciate architecture. Greet a stranger passing by on the street. All these and more are spiritual exercises for your body, enabling you to know joy and love. And in a world of distress – a stressed world – to return to calm is an act of resistance, of hope, of the world-to-come breaking into the present world.

This Advent, take time for such things.