‘Tis the season to be…waiting. Despite what’s going up in the shopping centres and the songs being piped through the PA systems, it is not Christmas…yet. We are living in a time of not-yet; of imagining what is on the horizon, but not fully seeing it or having it in our hands.
But we live in a culture that is not good at waiting. When we want something, we go and get it, or we order it on Amazon and a day later it arrives. Yet the season of Advent asks us to do something completely counter-cultural. It is to wait…and to hope.
Perhaps we are a culture that is also not very good at hoping. In holding the thing in our hands, the thing we have just ordered on Amazon, we have found our hunger satiated, for the moment. But it’s like filling up on white bread and fairy floss…out stomach is full for a minute, but we are not really nourished. Instead of waiting with growing appetites for something real and good, we fill up on rubbish. Rubbish that makes us forget that we are hungry.
Hungry. And what, indeed, are we hungry for? What are we really truly hoping for, in the depths of our guts? What are our bodies and souls yearning for?
Advent is a time to get in touch with our hunger. Our hope. Let’s resist the urge to fill up on junk food, and wait for the real thing.
Words by Rev Andreana
Image by Alex Harden, Flickr
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