Advent looks forward not just to Christmas, but the end of our time
Losing an old friend makes George Pitcher reflect on the nature of our age
Paddy Walsh was one of three or four friends I made when we were all sent away to boarding school, aged 13, and who I still see more than half a century later. Paddy and I never had much in common, other than when he spent a spell in the wine trade in adulthood, but we had good rapport.
At school, he was a cross-country runner and I was into divinity. But we shared a study – partly because nobody else would share one with either of us – and in recent years he retired to Eastbourne, which is 12 miles south of where I live in Sussex, so we renewed our teenage friendship a bit.
It always seems odd to use the past tense about someone one has known as long as I’ve known Paddy, but we must get used to it, because yesterday his wife, Teri – now his widow – emailed to say that Paddy had died suddenly in the night.
If I’m honest, my first response (other than sympathy for Teri) was that I was glad I’d answered some of Paddy’s emails, just hours before he died as it turned out, which I’d neglected for a few weeks. We were going to meet at a rather swanky London restaurant for lunch next Tuesday with another of our half-century club.
Paddy’s passing takes some processing. I don’t know why – people die all the time, to put it at its most blithe. Those of us in ordained ministry experience the truth of that more than most. A family member suggests that it may be because a close friend’s departure is a rite of passage towards our own mortality.
Advent Sunday
There probably isn’t a better time of year to die than any other, but for those of us of Christian faith the few days ahead of Advent Sunday this weekend seem particularly poignant for an exit – while, for our secular and pagan friends, the gloaming and darkness of these days seem to envelop not just the closing of the year, but of all our years. Then again, there is something about the post-covid, post-COP26 world that makes this particular Advent extra-existential.
To take the religious season first: Advent is now such a commerce-fest that its relevance is largely lost, even to many or perhaps most Christians. It’s a penitential season – we all know that – and was once accompanied by fasting ahead of Christmas, though less rigorously so than in Lent, ahead of Easter.
On the pagan side, it’s rooted in the Roman festival of Saturnalia, which with a clutch of associated pagan festivals celebrated the winter solstice, the shortest and darkest day that looked forward to the coming of light and life; resonant with solar monotheism, which held that the Sun – Sol Invictus – encompassed all divinities as one.
The common theme of belief here is darkness. It’s in the depth of darkness that we look forward to new light and life, a promise fulfilled in the coming of the spring season and Easter. But just as Christians (should) refrain from bypassing the desolation of Good Friday to get to the joy of Easter’s new life, so we are called to cherish, or at least to absorb, the darkness of this season of Advent.
Indeed, the Church’s traditional preaching themes for the four Sundays of Advent combine deep darkness with the distant prospect of light: Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell. These are the Four Last Things, the final stages of the human journey at the end of life, through death.
The Four Last Things don’t find much resonance in the Coca-Cola Lorries’ Christmas tour or the latest John Lewis cutesy commercial. That’s partly because the FLT aren’t just about delivery (or deliverance) in this life, nor are they only about the deaths through human history of individual souls. They are also wrapped up in eschatology, the theological study of the end of the created order, or the End Times – very much what Professor Brian Cox has been talking about in his BBC series Universe.
Properly existential
That’s where Advent gets properly existential, because judgment – the second of the Four Last Things – isn’t just about how individual lives are led (particular judgment), but also how humanity is collectively assessed at the end of time (general judgment, in eschatological terms). It also means that the human race can be judged on its own destiny and capacity for self-destruction, well ahead of our Milky Way’s collision with the galaxy of Andromeda, the end of our own Sun in some 4.5 billion years, or the end of the universe itself.
I’ve written here before about Christian hope and how it differs from optimism. The latter simply looks on the bright side of prospects and hopes for the best, as it were. The former marshals the human spirit to direct its own destiny.
It’s why the Church’s prayer book speaks of a “sure and certain hope of the resurrection” - there is a quality to human hope that generates its own surety and certainty. And its one of the main weapons with which, this Advent, we meet the existential threats of covid and climate collapse, as well as toasting absent friends, such as Paddy.
So Advent looks not just for the coming of the light at Christmas, the promise of the Nativity, the expulsion of the dark from humanity. It also looks to a second coming of the light at the end of the age. Our terminologies may vary, but the sacred and secular are on very common ground here.
My late friend Paddy, more secular than sacred, wrote a fantastically (and deliberately) Pooterish blog called Man About Eastbourne, an environment he loved as much as he loved travelling from it. I looked it up today and noted that his last entry was from June 2020 and related to his trip to the Algarve in February last year, just before covid pinned us all down and stopped us being people-about-anywhere.
In his final email to me on Tuesday, just hours before he died, regarding our prospective lunch next Tuesday, he wrote: “I don’t like to be too late as it takes an age to get back to Eastbourne.”
In that, he couldn’t have known how literally right he was.
George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE and an Anglican priest.