Advent 1: Hope Reconsidered

Last Sunday was the first Sunday in Advent.  Yes, this is the season of the church year which prepares for Christmas and does not actually jump right into the secular Christmas season after Thanksgiving- the American, or worse yet, the Canadian.  That mini-rant aside, we lit the first Advent Candle on the Advent wreath which is the candle for Hope. 

Hope seems to be something that we can always use more of – particularly in these times when we begin to see the light at the end of the COVID tunnel and another variant raises its ugly head and throws up more tunnel.  This time, it is the Omicron Variant which looms large in the COVID scene with possible threats of being more transmissible and perhaps being vaccine resistant.  But we live in hope that all will be well and all manner of things will be well in God’s time if not ours.

However, is there perhaps a less positive aspect to hope?  I am a strong believer that in most things there is a negative as well as a positive.  So, is there an aspect of hope that we should reconsider and not embrace fully - an aspect of hope that is not what God intends?  I was led to this cautionary thought when I tuned into an episode of On Being on National Public Radio in the United States.  The episode is entitled the Future of Hope https://onbeing.org/programs/pico-iyer-and-elizabeth-gilbert-the-future-of-hope-3/. 

The program is a wonderful exploration of the possibilities of hope – both positive and negative.  The thing that resonated with me the most listening to the program, was that living in hope can lead us to not living in the present.  The example that was used in the program was the experience of the interviewee, Elizabeth Gilbert, who was not as fully present to her loved one who was dying.  Rather than being fully present she was living in hope for a miraculous healing.  This idea was summed up in a poem by T S Eliot which was quoted by Gilbert:

“I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, but the faith and the love are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So, the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.”  ― T.S. Eliot

This does not mean that we give up on hope.  I believe that we do still need to live in hope.  The challenge for me is to hope for the right thing.  In Advent we live in the hope that the Prince of Peace will be born in us and to the world.  We can hope for peace by doing things small and large to bring peace rather than hate into our lives and the lives of those around us.  And we will live in the knowledge that in  the words of Julien of Norwich, “All will be well, and all manner of things will be well.”

May you be blessed this Advent to have hope for the right things on your journey.