Advent 2025 : day ten

 

One of the great themes of Advent is joy. (It is especially associated with the Third Sunday of Advent, also known as Gaudete Sunday; and this year,  JOY is the overall theme for Advent across the Church of England nationally.)

The author Brené Brown describes ‘joy’ as ‘sudden, unexpected, short-lasting, and high intensity. It’s characterized by a connection with others, or with God, nature, or the universe. Joy expands our thinking and attention, and it fills us with a sense of freedom and abandon.’

(Atlas of the Heart, p. 204)

I know too many people whose marriages have fallen into messy divorce. (That is not to pass judgement: marriage is hard. I am aware that singleness is also hard, but the point is not comparison; the point stands: marriage is hard.) I know far too many people whose lives have been touched by the death, by suicide, of someone close to them. I know people who are living, this Christmas, with end-stage terminal illness. People who have lost a much-loved family pet. (this is no small thing.) And this is not to look for the wider catastrophes of climate collapse or war that uproot and remove families from their lives and confront the watching – perhaps receiving – world with our own in/humanity. It is common to the human condition that we dwell in darkness and in the shadow of death.

Joy does not deny or dismiss this reality. Rather, it is under these conditions that joy is utterly essential, strengthening us to face our lives. For we do not face life alone, beneath a dispassionate void, but with the God who chose to become God-with-us in the birth of Jesus. He is the light that shines in the darkness, the light that grows, incrementally, to noon-day sun. But the dawn, the dawn sky, will take your breath away.

 

Advent 2025 : day nine

 

In our home we build up our Christmas decorations slowly through Advent. One of the pieces that comes out on the second weekend is a German wooden Christmas carousel/pyramid. Heat rises from candles to drive propellor blades that spin a nativity scene – slowly at first, then faster, building up momentum. In truth, it can be mesmerising, quite relaxing to look on.

But spinning around is not relaxing. And I am aware of an Anxious Generation, driven to distraction, unable to embrace stillness – to enter into the rest that God holds out to us. I am also aware that there are some in this very generation who are ‘returning’ to church, in search of God; returning to a place left behind by their parents’ (and perhaps grandparents) generation, drawn by the call of deep rest in a very fast digital moment. A generation who need to rediscover how to be quiet and still – on the inside – and in this Advent can help, as we discover the God who waits for us to wait for him.

One of the things many Christians do in Advent is read the poetry of the prophet Isaiah, who lived and wrote some 600 years before the birth of Jesus. At Morning Prayer today, we read these verses:

‘For thus said the Lord God, the Holy One of Israel:
In returning and rest you shall be saved;
in quietness and in trust shall be your strength.
But you refused and said,
‘No! We will flee upon horses’—
therefore you shall flee!
and, ‘We will ride upon swift steeds’—
therefore your pursuers shall be swift!
A thousand shall flee at the threat of one,
at the threat of five you shall flee,
until you are left
like a flagstaff on the top of a mountain,
like a signal on a hill.

‘Therefore the Lord waits to be gracious to you;
therefore he will rise up to show mercy to you.
For the Lord is a God of justice;
blessed are all those who wait for him.’

Isaiah 30:15-18

 

Advent 2025 : day eight

 

I learned recently that for some young adults (dubbed the Anxious Generation) at least, Advent calendars are a source of anxiety at being expected to remember to open a door / eat a piece of chocolate every day for twenty-four days. This is no joke, but an expression – and indicator – of the levels of anxiety, over performance and in relation to simple, daily tasks or habits, the younger generation live with – and if not for any given member of that cohort, likely for people they know personally.

This is a tragedy, because Advent practices are not meant to be burdensome. They are about building a sense of expectancy – flexing the muscles of hope – not hyper-vigilance. The Church has been waiting, actively, for Jesus to return for two thousand years. It is not possible to remain hyper-vigilant for any extended length of time (let alone millennia) but grace-filled habits train us for healthy lives. Whereas in Lent we might abstain from chocolate – a simple practice of learning to say no to immediate self-gratification; simple, but hard in an age addicted to both dopamine hits and sugar – in Advent we might embrace the discipline of receiving a gift.

Advent anxiety prevents us from entering into Advent. For me, the weekend just gone was a full one, with our parish church patronal festival, marked by the St Nicholas Fayre on Saturday, two services on Sunday morning, and a Christingle on Sunday evening. In the need to attend well to these things, I did not need the added pressure of writing a daily Advent calendar post. And so, I made the choice not to have to do so. To leave it – this thing I have done every Advent for twenty years – until tomorrow. To extend grace to myself, just as grace has been extended to me.

 

Advent 2025 : day seven

 

Today (6th December) is the Feast of St Nicholas, sometime Bishop of Myra, patron saint of children and sailors, defender of both orthodoxy – believing ‘rightly’ (faithfully) about God – and orthopraxis – acting ‘rightly’ (faithfully) in accordance with what we profess to believe. And the saint for whom the parish church I serve as vicar is named.

The parish church of St Nicholas, Bishopwearmouth, was dedicated as a place of worship ten days after the declaration that, for a Second time in just over two decades, we were at War. A declaration of another kind, that, however uncertain the world we live in, Christ is our hope. Following in the footsteps of Nicholas, as he followed in the footsteps of Jesus the Christ (the one sent by God to deliver his people from oppression), the ‘charism’ of this church (charism: the particular gift God has given this church to serve their neighbours) is to be a safe haven for those experiencing the storms of life – for those ‘lost at sea’. This is a place, and a community, I long to see filled with the joy of children and of people of all ages who have dared to call out to God to deliver them.

The Feast of St Nicholas always falls in Advent, provides a moment of joyous celebration (our patronal festival, however we mark it, which this year included the St Nicholas Fayre) in the approach to Christmas, and – if we allow it – recalibrates our lives to Jesus.

Photo: me, dressed as St Nicholas, on his feast day.

 

Advent 2025 : day six

 

Advent has its own flavours. Some years ago, Jo came across a recipe book of German Advent biscuits. Apparently, there is a German tradition of serving plates of mixed, home-baked biscuits to anyone who visits your home in Advent. Neither of us are German, but Jo lived there for a year, and we both enjoy visiting Germany. So, Jo decided that she would take up this tradition and bakes a couple of different batches of biscuits each Advent weekend.

Both of my grandfathers fought against Nazi Germany in the Second World War; but their grandchildren and great-grandchildren have known friendship. The prophet Isaiah foretold the birth of a child who would be known, among other titles, as the Prince of Peace; and Christians see that hope fulfilled in Jesus. In a world were peace seems distant, we are called to hold fast to the hope that in him, all will – one day – be reconciled. In the face of todays’ seemingly intractable conflicts, we remind ourselves of where peace has overcome hostility. Could something as simple as sharing biscuits help us to do this?

Hospitality is central to the Christmas story. Joseph brings his expectant wife, Mary, to the home of a relative. Social convention requires the relative to welcome them, but the space in the home (sometimes a separate room, sometimes an end partitioned off by a curtain, sometimes a shelter on the flat roof) where travelling guests might sleep is either too small for Mary too labour in or is already occupied – further evidence of hospitality, extended to another relative or to a stranger, for social convention required hospitality be extended to both.

Who might enter your home this Advent? And what might you serve them?

 

Advent 2025 : day five

 

In our home, we build up our Christmas decorations slowly through Advent, bringing out a box on each of the four weekends. It begins with just a few changes: a figurine of a pregnant woman, symbolizing Mary, placed on one end of the mantlepiece, with an attending angel; our Advent calendar opposite. I bring my wife a mug of coffee in bed every morning before we get up (itself another ritual) and on the first day of Advent we swap out our usual mugs for ones we only use in Advent: simple markers. The tree does not go up until week three.

In this way, we build up a sense of expectancy, ready to celebrate Christmas when it arrives – a twelve-day feast; we are not sick of it all by the afternoon of Boxing Day, desperate to pack everything away for another year.

But this might also help us to wait expectantly for Christ’s return: recognising – learning to recognise – that Jesus breaks into our lives in many often small and accumulative ways; that the victory of justice and mercy over exploitation and oppression is not, usually, dramatic – and yet, little by little – gradually – comes around again and again.

 

Advent 2025 : day four

 

Advent has its very own soundtrack, a mix of songs in a minor key, filled with longing for the light, and stirring carols focused more on Christ’s return than on his first coming as the Babe of Bethlehem.

I love more traditional Advent carols, like Hills of the North, Rejoice and People, look East. But in recent years, my go-to Advent playlist has included the albums Advent Songs (2021) by The Porter’s Gate; and Good News (2016) and the earlier In the Town of David (2006) by Ordinary Time. Check them out.

 

Advent 2025 : day three

 

I have a memory of a childhood Advent calendar. Card, with (probably – here, my memory is shaky) a picture of the hills around Bethlehem for backdrop. Doors opened carefully, re-opened year after year. Each one revealing a picture, depicting some character or item relating to the nativity, and a verse from the Bible on the back of the door.

These days, the Advent calendar on our mantlepiece is a wooden box, with twenty-four doors that lift upward, not to the side. Behind each door, Jo hides a piece from a jigsaw of an icon from the Church of the Nativity, for her, and a fairtrade individual ‘taster’ bar of chocolate, for me.

The practice of opening a little door every day through Advent, a door that is linked to the story of the incarnation, might shape how we open larger doors. So far this Advent, I have opened my front door to a neighbour, shut out of her own home and in need of help, and to delivery drivers, dropping off Bibles I had ordered for friends who are exploring faith. The vicarage doorbell is loud – I cannot adjust the volume, and it makes me jump whenever it rings. It does not predispose me to welcome those who come to my door. Yet the Advent calendar might resist that move; might predispose me to see Jesus coming to my door in the face of a neighbour or stranger. Coming to me, in need or in response to my own need. (In the Gospels we see Jesus ministered-to by others and ministering to others.)

    

Advent 2025 : day two

 

Warning: mention of suicide

The Advent candles are not the only candles we light in our home throughout Advent. We also light a frankincense & myrrh candle. One of the smells of Advent, along with cinnamon biscuits—for smell connects deeply with memory and so has a key role in keeping traditions alive—is frankincense & myrrh. Two of the three gifts (along with gold) presented to the infant Jesus and his parents by the magi/wisemen/kings.

This is a dark time of year. The sun does not rise above the horizon, here where I live, until 8.00 a.m. (by mid-December, not until 8.15 a.m.) and sets mid-afternoon.

These are dark times, at the best of times. Not a week goes by without news of another life taken in violence by its own hand. Lives that have run dry of hope, carrying a burden of pain they just don’t think they can continue to bear. Tragically, often longing to be reunited with family members who have died too soon, carried away by illness or accident or suicide.

For some, this darkness, this void of despair, is evidence against the existence—or at least the efficacy—of God, of a god who is good and loving and strong. And yet, for others, it is in the darkness that Light and Love shine most brightly. How, then, might we side with the Light and Love?

Those gifts—made to a child who all too soon will find himself a refugee, his peers butchered by hardened soldiers at the orders of a fragile king—just might hold a clue, a key. Incense, symbol of prayer rising; prayers rising, even when we can find no words. And myrrh, used to prepare a body for burial, a final act of tenderness, of kindness, of dignity; and though these days embalming is undertaken by professionals, we still might embrace the bereaved with tender touch.

In the darkness, we light a frankincense & myrrh candle, and breath in what it means to wait, until our eyes adjust, until the clouds pass over and the stars are revealed, fierce pinpoints of light in blazing glory.