Advent is the Subversion of Time (as we usually know it)
Phaedra Taylor, “Hope,” from The Light Has Come: Prayer Cards for Advent, Christmas & Epiphany.
Advent is the subversion of time as we usually know it.
As we usually know it, time is never enough. It burdens us with seemingly infinite possibilities and it oppresses us by its impossible expectations. This is how Allen Johnson, professor emeritus of anthropology at UCLA, describes our warped perception of “free time”:
“Free time gets converted into consumption time because time spent neither producing nor consuming comes increasingly to be viewed as wasted.”
Such a view seeps into our habits of speech:
· “You're wasting my time.”
· “You’ve mis-budgeted your time.”
· “You’re living on borrowed time.”
· “You're running out of time.”
But in Advent, we remember that there is always enough time. We live in “a time of grace,” writes the Swiss theologian Karl Barth, and “in such a grace, time does not flee but flows, it is not empty but fulfilled.”
Today we go back in time, then, with the prophets, in order to discern the meaning of our present time.
Today we remember that the Spirit of God arrives, not in the nick of time, but in the fullness of time.
Today we go to the center of time wherein the Incarnate God enters fully into the chaos of time.
Today we anticipate how in his resurrection “Christ restores time by setting it free again,” as the Scottish theologian Thomas Torrance reminds us.
Today we go to the end of time in order to discover the proper purpose of all time: wonder, love and praise.
Advent, in short, reminds us what time it is for. Now is the time for waiting. Now is the time for simplicity. To be quiet. To repent and to relinquish. To un-anxiously anticipate the fulfillment of God’s good purposes for our lives.
Now likewise is the time to entrust to God all of the ways that we have felt crushed under by time—by lost time, unrecoverable time, painful time, hopeless time.
Now is the time to begin again, and to entrust our times to God’s grace. We begin not alone, of course, but in the company of saints, for we could never live this counter-cultural way of time on our own efforts.
Now is the time to begin again.
We begin again, in grace, with Christ, in whom there is plenty of time.
(The prayer below is from my collection of Advent prayers in Prayers for the Pilgrimage.)
(The image above is from The Light Has Come: Prayer Cards for Advent, Christmas & Epiphany, a resource that Phaedra and I created in order to serve individuals, families and communities during these three seasons of the church calendar.)
