Advent: The Season That Waits for the Light

The candle is lit before the room is dark enough to need it. That is the strange discipline of Advent: to begin watching before the watching feels urgent, to light one flame against a dusk that has not yet fallen, because the flame is not really about the dusk. It is about what is coming.

Advent is the season of preparation that precedes the feast of the Nativity. In the Western churches it runs four Sundays, beginning on the Sunday nearest the last day of November and closing on the eve of Christmas itself. In the Eastern churches the corresponding season is the Nativity Fast, forty days of restraint and prayer beginning on the fifteenth of November old style. The two calendars do not always agree on the count, but they agree entirely on the shape: a stretch of waiting laid deliberately across the darkening days of the year, so that the coming light finds a people already watching for it, not caught unawares.

The Season Before the Feast

Nothing about Advent is filler. Every practice of it points forward. The wreath's four candles mark the Sundays as they come, one flame added to the last until the circle is full light on the fourth week, and the whole ring stands ready to be joined by the white candle of Christmas Day. The O Antiphons, sung in the last week before the feast in the Western rite, address the coming Christ by titles drawn from Isaiah and the Wisdom books, one great name a night, building toward the vigil. The readings of the season turn again and again to a single figure standing in a river, a voice crying in a wilderness that the way must be made straight, the crooked places plain. That voice belongs to Saint John the Forerunner, and no one has ever kept Advent honestly without hearing it. His life, told in The Voice That Ran Before, or read free in its first volume at the Invitation, is Advent's own biography before it is anyone else's: a man whose entire vocation was to announce an arrival he would not live to see completed.

Beside the Forerunner stands the woman who carried the arrival in her own body. Advent's fourth week, in both East and West, turns toward Mary of Nazareth with a particular tenderness, because her nine months of waiting are the pattern every Advent imitates in miniature. Her fiat at the angel's word, her journey to Elizabeth, her Magnificat sung before the birth had even happened, all of it belongs to this season more than to any other. Her life, Blessed Among Women, free to begin at its Invitation, is the record of what it looks like to hold a promise in the body and trust it before there is any proof.

Watching, Fasting, Singing

Advent has always asked for a certain restraint, lighter than the fast of the great Lenten spring but real: fewer festivities, a plainer table in some households, an intention not to rush the ornaments out before their season. It has also always asked for song, and for one bishop in particular whose feast falls square inside these weeks. Nicholas of Myra is kept on the sixth of December in both East and West, a bright interruption of gift and generosity set right in the middle of the fast, as if the Church could not wait even the full forty days to let a little of Christmas show through early. His life, told in Nicholas of Myra: Bishop, Wonderworker, Father of the Poor, free at its opening volume, belongs on any Advent shelf, because his charity toward the poor and the hidden is precisely the charity Advent asks its keepers to practice while they wait.

The waiting itself has its own literature, older than any modern devotional. Augustine of Hippo spent decades of his life in a longing he could not name until he named it, and his account of that longing, restless until it rested in God, reads in Advent like a mirror held up to the whole season. His life, The Restless Heart, free to sample at its Invitation, is a study in what it costs to wait honestly rather than merely to pass time.

Thomas à Kempis wrote from a cell built for exactly this kind of stillness, and his counsel to withdraw, to quiet the appetite for noise and distraction, to let the soul empty itself so that something greater can fill it, is Advent counsel whether or not he ever named the season. His life, The Quiet Cell, free at its first volume, suits the fourth week especially, when the waiting grows quietest just before it ends.

A Shelf for the Waiting

One further life belongs here, and it belongs with particular weight. Dietrich Bonhoeffer spent his last Advents in a prison cell, writing to his family and his fiancée about candles and hymns and the hope of a season he was not certain he would live to see fulfilled outside those walls. He knew, better than most theologians ever get the chance to know, what it costs to wait for a light that has not yet come, and to go on believing in its coming anyway. His life, The Cost of a Life, free to begin at its Invitation, reads every Advent like a letter addressed forward in time to whoever is waiting now.

Each of these lives can be started for nothing at all through the free Invitation volumes on the full shelf of beginnings, and each opens onto its complete three-volume life for the reader who wants to keep going past the feast. Advent is short, four candles or forty days, but the waiting it teaches does not end when the wreath is put away. It only changes what it is waiting for next.