More Advent Than Christmas

I think of myself as a generally frugal person. I’m not in the habit of finding too many extra ways to spend money. If I’m being honest, I guess the exceptions would be books, running gear, and the search for the journal that’s finally going to make me the self-actualized person I was always meant to be (I still haven’t found it, by the way). But, in general, I don’t go out of my way to spend money.

Of course, we live in a world that makes that more than a little difficult.

Just this morning, I opened my laptop for the express reason of checking into our household budget—which is, of course, meant to keep our spending in check!—only to be immediately advertised to in about a dozen different ways. Emails from different companies about holiday deals they are running, various social media advertisements—you know the list.

On a podcast I was listening to the other day, the cohosts were pondering why gratitude seems always to be in such short supply. One of the hosts, a priest from South Florida, said that it actually made sense to him, that we live in a world that is, “an all-out assault on contentment,” so it’s naturally difficult to cultivate anything like gratitude.

That’s what it is—those advertisements on my computer, an all-out assault. And, of course, there’s more. No matter what activity we’re in the midst of, everything around us is shouting about how the next purchase will make us truly fulfilled. How we need this or that thing to be as good or attractive or happy as the person next to us. How a new vacation or car or home will do the trick and finally bring us peace.

And maybe the Christmas season has been warped into the worst version of all this. A season where we’re meant to celebrate the birth of God as a poor child, born to poor parents with not even a place to lay their heads—and we’ve made it into a time to equate love with how much we’re willing to spend on another person. Where the goal of companies is to convince us that our joy is really rooted in whether we’ll purchase their product or not.

And I don’t say that in a finger-wagging kind of way—I’m guilty of all of that! If we live in a world that’s an “all-out assault on contentment,” the Christmas season might just be the biggest battle we have to fight.

Which is one reason Advent can be such a gift to us. Because Advent begs us to live with contentment. It’s a season that calls our attention to our final hope, that Christ will come again and make all things right. But it’s a season that also understands how very far off that reality is. How much we live in a world that isn’t right, and how our lives—try as we might to make them otherwise—are bent and broken just like the world we’re living in.

And Advent says that we must not despair of all that. We must not let the brokenness of this world destroy our sense of hopeful longing for the redemption of this world, including ourselves. One of my favorite poets, Wendell Berry, writes in the spirit of Advent when he says:

Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.

In other words, be content in the middle of it all.

Know that the world is not as it should be. Know that our lives are not as they should be. And rather than assuming that the next purchase, the next vacation, the next relationship will fix it—just be. Just be where you are, with whom you are, content to wait with hope. “Be joyful/ though you have considered all the facts.”

We have so much to learn from this brief, holy season of Advent. And this is good news, because life is very often much more Advent than Christmas.