The Slow Way: Advent and Hope

We often need to experience our hope in the form of cranky prophets. We need hope that’s a little rough around the edges. Hope that looks like real life.

for the frantic strivers, serial doers, and weary achievers

Tis the season for hope, that tiny, practical word that keeps us alive when the world turns violent and dangerous. Hope is the kind of word that allows us to cling to the people we love, even when it feels impossible to see the best in them. Hope allows us to believe that the world can move toward justice and rightness, despite our tendency toward violence, despite humanity’s misuse of power, despite the cruelty of grief.

Hope allows us to unpack boxes for the grieving friend who needs to start over. Hope orders pizza and places books on the shelf, organizes the playroom, and puts the sheet on the baby’s crib. Hope is a task that seems impossible in the abstract, but is sometimes simply painting a wall, or deciding which kitchen drawer makes the most sense for utensils. Hope is something we carry for one another.

Hope is the thing that keeps me sending my disabled child to bed in underwear every night, knowing that I will most likely change those sheets in the morning. We’re six weeks into this process, and I know there is a time for admitting to challenges and a time for believing in all that is possible. Hope is the courage to keep washing the sheets.

Hope is the thing that teaches parents to choose love over fear when raising kids, to recognize that scary choices don’t have to equal a scary future. Hope is the thing that keeps us creative, trying new things in new ways. Hope is the thing that wakes us up in the morning, knowing that the world is sometimes dangerous, and sometimes so very very good.

Hope, as our girl Emily Dickinson reminds us, “is the thing with feathers,” but hope never ignores the truth of things. Hope is never sentimental. In her book of Advent sermons, Fleming Rutledge calls this season of Advent a “critique of sentimentality.” Advent is a demand that we don’t jump into lifeless chatter about peace on earth, when there is no peace on earth (to quote the prophet Jeremiah). Advent is a clear-eyed recognition of the ache of darkness in the darkest time of year.

Hope is a wild choice. And who better for us to learn from than the wildest of wild ones, the prophet John the Baptist, who always shows up in the Advent readings these weeks before Christmas. I love that we are forced to read about John when we’d rather get right to the sweet baby and the angels. The wise ancestors who put together our traditional readings for these weeks leading up to Christmas seemed to recognize that we often need to experience our hope in the form of cranky prophets who eat locusts. Hope that’s a little rough around the edges. Hope that looks like real life.

John the Baptist told his followers that he came preparing the way for the Messiah, for the Christ. This makes a lot of sense. Preparation and hope are always interconnected. There’s nothing simple about creating a new path, especially not in the way John the Baptist talked about it, quoting Isaiah. He told his followers his work was breaking down the mountains and rough places into a smooth and easy plain. His work was filling in the valleys to pave a flat walking path, shaping all those crooked trails into easy straight roads. Hope is a metaphor. And it’s a metaphor we need in a world full of mountains, valleys, and oh so many rough places.

“Deeper Still” is a song I’ve loved since my college days more than two decades ago. I still throw on Bebo Norman’s voice when I need a kickstart of hope, words I come back to when I need to be reminded:

Tonight I rose up with the moon

And looking down from high above

I saw a world carved and confused

Into valleys deep in need of love

And falling down all thick with grace

Heaven's cloud of mystery

Was filling every empty space

Down to the depth of human need

I see John the Baptist as a subscriber to that cloud of mystery. There’s no accounting for hope. It rises up from the valleys, and falls down from the skies. Sometimes we hold it for others, and sometimes others hold it for us.

Sometimes hope’s carriers are rough around the edges like a prophet in the wilderness demanding repentance and ritual. And sometimes hope is a thing with feathers—light and winged.

Sometimes hope looks like preparing the way, and sometimes it looks like sitting in front of the Christmas tree reminding yourself that Advent is, as Rutledge writes, “the paradoxical combination of waiting and hastening (II Pet. 3:12), suffering and joy, judgment and deliverance, apocalyptic woe and eschatological hope.”

I can tell you about the seasons of Advent that have felt the most like waiting, suffering, judgement and woe. And the seasons of Advent that have felt like hastening, joy, deliverance and hope. But the longer I live through the seasons of my life, through the valleys and mountains, and straight into the plains, the more I agree with Rutledge that, “It is the combination that counts.”

As my pastor preached last week: “Advent means arrival. The arrival of the kingdom of God.”

Or, as we like to say around here, the arrival of God’s dream for the world. God’s dream always exists in the space of hope. We are moving toward that dream, choosing hope in the midst of all the valleys, all the rough places, all the mountains that need to be brought low.

Yes, we’re waiting for the arrival of Christ. And that arrival looks like showing up for each other, believing in all that’s possible, asking for the Dream of God to come here, right now. Seeking peace in the world and in our relationships with one another.

What is hope but longing for rightness and goodness, for justice and joy? May we keep preparing the way for the Cloud of Mystery to fill in all the places that lack.

A Slow Practice

“Whoever sings, prays twice.” - St. Augustine

I love this idea. In this season when Mariah Carey is belting Christmas sentimentality on every corner, it can feel like a spiritual practice just to keep our minds on the stubborn hope of Advent. So let’s make it an actual practice this week.

Your job is to find an Advent tune to focus on this week. Maybe you are most moved by classical music and thinking about John the Baptist has you reaching back to that time you performed Handel’s “Messiah” in high school choir. If so, find a recording or even better, go to a sing along! (They’re everywhere. I bet you can find one.)

Maybe your Advent “hymn” of choice is the great Joni Mitchell’s achy ballad “River.” Or you like to stick with the official advent hymns like “O Come O Come Emmanuel” or “Come Thou Long Expected Jesus.” I also love the children’s album “Waiting Songs” by Rain For Roots, or The Brilliance’s beautiful record, “Advent Collection.”

For our practice this week, find a specific Advent song to focus on, one that looks to coming hope in the midst of pain or darkness, and start your day with that song every day for the next week. Let your heart and mind rest in an Advent space before you venture toward the Hallmark movies or present wrapping realities of your December.

After you pray with the song, close with this prayer, taken from that Bebo Norman song: “Today, Holy Spirit, fall down to our valleys, thick with grace. In this season of darkness, may your cloud of mystery fill the empty places. And may we have eyes to see the hope of it. Amen.”

A Few Things:

• Thanks for your patience with my posts lately. It’s been a season of So Many Things! But I’m catching up and hope to have the rest of our Slow Way Letters in your inboxes for the next couple of Fridays, including this week. I always love this season of reflection, hope and ache. (So Enneagram Four of me!) And I’m grateful for the chance to share with you what I’m quietly learning in this season that can feel so very loud.

• If you or your church are looking for poems to aid in your Advent or Christmas services, my series of Advent poems are available for churches to use. I simply ask that you give me credit and publish them with this copyright: © 2024 Micha Boyett. You can find them in previous Slow Way Letters: here, here, here, and here.

• If you prefer to listen to the poems, you can find them in these episodes of The Slow Way Podcast “Mary: A Girl In The Stars,” “How He Entered,” “A Story of Sacred Friendship,” and “Darkness.”