Creating a Culture of Advent

There is more than one way to talk about expectation and education. We should remember as Christian educators and students that we are a people "outside the city" still awaiting the full vindication of God on that last of all days, and even in that vindication we expect our academic service and ministry to be tried by the fire of Christ's judgment seat. Our programs, lesson plans, and papers will be purged. What will remain of my own, I wonder?

The season of Advent, for example, stresses not only the first coming of Christ, but also the second coming. It is a season about being prepared, and such annual preparation is good for our academic calendar-driven mania. Advent reminds us that we are called to waiting, to patience between the first and second advents of our savior. To wait is to remember how fragile our egos, how empty our claims for ourselves are, how partial our self-concepts are. When we wait, we may be left alone for a season, staring into the silence, unable to be propped up by another's friendship or false praise or kind mercy. When we wait, we may face temptations to be afraid, to fear that God will not act. When we wait, we also face the temptation to onui, to boredom and to cynicism. In the midst of our longing and our vulnerability, we may even be tempted to disbelief, to wonder if any of this that we hold to is true at all.

But this waiting, this "being put on hold" is good for us. In our flattened-out economy of instant everything, we need to learn to wait in silence. Silence is an important preparation for learning, a fertile field sowed in both peace and suffering. To create a culture of Advent is to place our honors and awards within the context of eternity, to see them as gifts to be given away. They are accolades in the academy that we sometimes achieve in sweat and tears and sleepless nights, yet they are finally still gifts--not paper and parchment we can hold on to forever. It is better to wear them lightly as Thomas, Archbishop Beckett secretly wore a hairshirt under his Canterbury robes. We either undertake this voluntarily or what we are left with is finally a far more painful separation. T.S. Eliot's masterful Little Gidding reflects on this strange choice of persecution or of apostasy:

Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire (sec. IV).

This I admit seems entirely counter-intuitive to the mission of higher education. We are accustomed to the work of words and knowledge. To consider that our calling might deserve divine wrath seems offensive at best, and possibly sadomasochistic. Paul warns us, however, that "[w]e know that we all possess knowledge. Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. The man who thinks he knows something does not yet know as he ought to know" (I Cor. 8:1-2). We need to go without; we need to find ourselves alone; we need to be left with ourselves trembling before the throne of the Almighty Judge and before the Master of All Things.

During our waiting, we remember that we need Jesus to come and to tear down our career pretenses, to curse our pedagogical inadequacies, and to pronounce a warning to our inflated souls in order that we might be saved. Only when we give ourselves over to such a place can we receive the blessing of renewal that God has for us, including the form it must take in the academy. Only when we ourselves are aware of our own limitations, our self-deceptions, and our sin are we then prepared to extend the promise of God's good peace, his good wholeness, his honor to others. Only then can we begin to see our students and teachers as Christ sees them. May this prayer be our own:

May God be merciful to us and bless us,show us the light of his countenance and come to us.
May your ways be known upon earth,your saving health among all nations.
May the peoples praise you, O God; let all the peoples praise you.
May the nations be glad and sing for joy, for you judge the peoples with equity and guide all the nations upon earth.
May the peoples praise you, O God; let all the peoples praise you.
The earth has brought forth her increase; may God, our own God, give us his blessing.
May God give us his blessing, and may all the ends of the earth stand in awe of him (Psalm 67, BCP)

Advent, after all, means "appearing." We are each to prepare our hearts to be images of God, to be an advent of Christ--an appearing of Christ-- in our circle of influence, wherever that may be. The nations need his saving health. If the primary ontological reality is participation (caritas), then a history based on power abuse is a partial history, a history of evil only as negation. We look for our eschatological bodies to be perfect and to behold the beatific vision. What we are is not lost but refined.

A culture of Advent is a culture of forgiveness, living in two times: the past offense and God's completed restoration held together but the later like a counterpoint revising the former's meaning. Our final unction is a pledge of our final healing. The beatific vision need not be understood as a static vision that privileges the theoretical disciplines over the applied as more reflective of the eschaton's final state. If the energies of God are active, ever circulating in love, then as the children realize in C.S. Lewis' The Last Battle, we can go forever "further up and further in."