What Happened to Advent?
putting the waiting back into wanting
When I think of the world in which I grew up, I tend to imagine a lost age of innocence. I don’t know if that’s a common trait, easily explained in terms of personal psychology, but I do know that when I cast my mind back to the dim and distant 1980s, I remember a time when church congregations were on average twice the size they are today, school assemblies were basically Christian, and all the shops were closed on Sundays. Mobile phones were a space-age novelty the size of bricks – the only people who had them were cartel bosses and stockbrokers, presumably because they needed to talk to each other – and, hard though it may be to believe, there was no such thing as the internet. Personal debt was the exception rather than the rule, and there was a credit card called Access – remember Access, your flexible friend – whose advertising slogan was: Access takes the waiting out of wanting…
It was a clever turn of phrase, a neat marketing ploy, and now largely forgotten – Access was taken over by Mastercard in the 90s – but the phrase still sticks in my mind. What felt new and exciting then, the notion that our material desires can, even should, be fulfilled immediately, has become the norm now, and that reflects or, more accurately, has given rise to, a very different mindset.
Now we live in a world in which instant gratification has become so taken-for-granted that it is almost assumed to be a ‘human right’. Access to information – an incomprehensibly mind-boggling amount of information – is instantly available on the mobile device that is always to hand, a device which for some people, in fact, hardly ever leaves the hand. We can find out almost anything, almost instantly. And we can fulfil almost every whim, almost instantly. There are very few things that can’t be bought online, and many of the things we can buy online are available for delivery the very next day, sometimes even within hours. As long as you’ve got a functioning credit card, you can do pretty much anything and everything you want these days.
As a result, our tolerance for waiting, for delayed gratification – and with it our experience of the intensification of joy that can sometimes come from waiting – has all but disappeared. In the 80s, paying by card was the exception rather than the rule; lots of businesses didn’t even accept them. Mail order catalogues, rather than online shopping, represented the height of consumer convenience. Nowadays, the very idea of sending off for, and then choosing items from, a printed catalogue, filling out an order form using your own handwriting, signing a cheque or going to the post office to buy a postal order, putting it all in an envelope and putting that in a post box, and then waiting… Waiting days, or even weeks, for a package to arrive… It’s almost inconceivable. Can you imagine trying to explain all of that to anyone under the age of 40? They would look at you as if you were from another planet.
We live, as we all know, in a consumer society, whose fundamental imperative to commodify absolutely everything is so all-pervasive that it is very difficult to imagine things being any other way. Consumerism is very air we breathe: our lives are shaped and our identities defined, individually and collectively, by what we buy and own. Our natural desires, for love and belonging, are cynically manipulated to ends that are deliberately designed not to provide fulfilment. The human life cycle is divided up into age-related marketing segments. Advertising sells the promise of happiness, wellbeing and prosperity as the ultimate goal of human existence. In this new religious paradigm, choice has replaced sacrifice as the religious leitmotif of modern life.
Unfortunately, however, consumerism is predicated on a whopping great big lie. It promises the satisfaction of our desires, but is really dependent on their constant stimulation. It’s not about getting what we want, but perpetually wanting something else. That’s what feeds the machine. And that’s what makes it the all-consuming monster of dystopian nightmares.
Worst of all, for people in my line of work, the institutions of the old religion (i.e. the churches) are far from immune to the corrosive acid of consumerism that converts even the consumer into yet another commodity. In spite of having the resources to articulate a counter-narrative, Christians are as trapped in the net as everyone else.
What we call a ‘religion’, whether it be consumerism or Christianity, is simply that which defines a culture. The paradigm that once was shaped by the story of God nailed to a tree hasn’t been replaced by something else, it has mutated into a ghastly perversion of itself. In conforming to the new religion, the church of the old religion adapts itself to become more relevant and appealing to increasingly niche markets. We advertise our services, we compete for people’s attention, we desperately try to be relevant, and we conform to the demands and expectations of a wider society that has long since lost interest. This is church, not as a universal fellowship in which we are formed after the likeness of Christ, but atomised associations of the like-minded: church made in our own image. To be a Christian in the contemporary consumer society is to adopt yet another lifestyle choice. And the church, being complicit in this, is – for reasons that probably warrant a separate article – complicit in its own decline.
This decline is most evident not so much in the statistics of those who don’t attend church, but the numbers who have no knowledge at all of the basic vocabulary of a Christian worldview. An almost certainly apocryphal tale illustrates this well. A group of art students were visiting the National Gallery for the first time. Seeing all the religious paintings in the medieval and renaissance collections, images of the Virgin Mary and the crucifixion and so on, the students were particularly impressed by the fact that there were so many depictions of women as the principal subject. ‘It’s so great to see all these positive affirmations of motherhood’ one of them said to their tutor, ‘but why is the baby always shown as a boy?’
I can’t remember where I first read or heard this story, but as a comment on the state of religious literacy in our society today, it does seem to have a rather depressing ring of truth about it.
Surveys suggest that many, if not most, people under the age of forty – or maybe it’s fifty now – are unsure of the basic outline of the Christmas story. And as Christmas becomes ever more nakedly commercial, further and further removed from anything even vaguely Christian, so we lament the loss of what we think of as its true meaning. There’s an irony here, of course, because the whole notion of a midwinter celebration of consumer excess and debauchery to mark the turning of the year goes back to Roman times, at least – if not even earlier.
It was only in the fourth century that Christians started celebrating the birth of Jesus on the 25th of December; a smart move to adopt an existing festival that everybody was celebrating anyway, and rebrand it as part of the new state religion.
Prior to that, the Roman festival of Saturnalia, starting on the 17th of December, marked the end of the year with raucous partying and the exchange of gifts. Then came the solstice, literally meaning when the sun stands still. It actually lasts a few days, and was observed as a time of relative quiet, before the partying was resumed with renewed vigour for the new year celebrations to welcome the return of the sun and the gradual lengthening of the days. And that, if you think about it, is more or less the pattern of what still goes on, at least in northern Europe, to this day.
We complain that Christmas has lost its true meaning, but you could just as easily argue that it’s simply defaulted to a pre-Christian norm, albeit under the anodyne label of the ‘festive season’.
The first signs of Christmas appear at the beginning of October; by the time we get to Advent it’s as if it’s Christmas already – there is no sense of waiting for it at all – as the shops are piled from floor to ceiling with all manner of things made in China that we neither need, want or are able to afford, whilst Christmas pop songs, the contemporary secular substitute for traditional carols, are played on endless repeat. I don’t know if it’s just my cultural programming or if the sentimental register of carols is really any less nauseating than Christmas pop songs, but they are surely, objectively, less banal. Either way, by the time Christmas finally dawns, we’re pretty fed up with it all. On Boxing Day, the decorations come down, and it’s all over. Meanwhile, the shops start getting ready for Easter.
In all of this Advent has almost completely disappeared from our cultural consciousness. This is a great pity because, apart from anything else, it’s a season that challenges the empty nihilism of consumerism. Of course, that’s why it’s been so completely obliterated. It profoundly contradicts one of the fundamental principles of consumerism – namely instant gratification – whereby the gap between wanting and having must be reduced until there is no gap at all. Advent, by contrast is all about the gap, it’s all about waiting.
Contrary to the deceptive allure of the Access card, it’s not about taking the waiting out of wanting, but putting the wanting back into waiting.
Watching, waiting, and waking are three related words that all share the same etymological root. And they represent a core theme of the spiritual life. Advent, the season of waiting for Christmas, starts with the story of Jesus cautioning his disciples that God’s kingdom may come suddenly, amid signs of great tribulation, and without warning. If we are not watching and waiting, if we are not awake, we will be lost.
The theme of keeping awake, or even just waking up in the first place, is absolutely central to the spiritual endeavour, as found in many different traditions. Awakening, in these terms, requires more of us than simply being mindful and aware of the present moment, though that might be a good place to start. It’s about waking up from the hypnotic daydream that we have come to believe is ‘normal’. Waking up to our authentic selves. Waking up to the reality of those around us. Waking up to the deeper truth of the way things are. ‘Keep awake,’ warns Jesus sternly in the parable of the foolish bridesmaids, ‘for you know neither the day nor the hour’ (Matthew 25.13). And indeed we do not. This is a call to pay attention to the spiritual dimension of human existence, to reorder our priorities, and to apply ourselves to the discipline of what really matters.
We see a similar theme, not surprisingly, in the letters of St Paul – to the nascent Christian communities at Rome, Corinth, Ephesus and Thessalonica – in which he frequently addresses the pressing need for awakening, whether from the darkness of ignorance, or the slumber of sensuality and self-indulgence. Perhaps he would denounce consumerism in his letters – or, more likely, his blog posts – if he was around today.
This wake up call remains our constant companion in the spiritual life: waking up is what it is all about. And it is urgent, for we know not the hour. Indeed, it could be right now.