Since graduating from university, I've sought elusive satisfaction in my work. I’ve been a water engineer (and continue to be one). I completed a PhD in philosophy. I tried academia. And now I write.
Writing comes closest to scratching the itch—when words and ideas flow, I lose track of time, and I experience deep joy. But flies still sully the ointment. My time for writing is chronically short. I crave full, consecutive days, weeks, and months to write, yet my reality is writing in ragged snatches, wedged between quotidian duties. (Exhibit A: I’m editing this piece between shifts of prepping food for Thanksgiving.)
I also yearn for a wider audience. What I think is my best work—a novel manuscript I’ve spent nine years writing and at least two years pitching to agents—has yet to see the light of day. Beyond some writerly friends and a few helpful editors, no one has read it. It languishes on my computer, two unnoticed megabytes, alongside last year’s tax records and invoices from our latest home repair.
Lately, I’ve been applying another coat of polish to the manuscript, preparing for one last proposal, which I plan to submit before Christmas. With the holiday season upon us, I imagine it will be months before I know the result. Months of checking my email too often—expectantly, hopefully, anxiously—waiting to hear from a publisher.
Advent Waiting?
Since it’s Advent and Jesus is my Man, the waiting seems appropriate. Advent is, after all, the season when followers of Jesus wait. And there’s a straightforward way in which my wait for a publishing deal is waiting for Jesus to act. I take him to be a member of the Trinity, that divine trio in charge of providence, and so I view a publishing deal—a thing that feels, at this point, mostly out of my control—as an opportunity my Messiah either will or will not afford. In this sense, and in this season, I wait for Jesus.
But is that the kind of waiting Advent’s really about? Waiting for something you want from the Divine Vending Machine? Strictly, Advent’s a season when believers wait for Jesus himself.
As a reenactment of the Bethlehem story, we wait for the Messiah child to be laid in a manger. But perhaps less figuratively (and more strangely), Advent is also about waiting for the return of Messiah—the second coming or “Parousia,” as theologians call it.
Believers understand the Parousia as that time when Jesus will return to finally and completely fulfill the promise of the gospel—to make God's kingdom evident, to establish justice and peace, to put sorrow and sighing to flight, to make all things new, to set all things right, to be fully and obviously present with his people.
Misplaced Longings
At my most lucid, I understand my longing for a publishing deal, and more generally the quest for satisfaction in my work, as a misplaced longing for the Parousia, for God’s appearing.
My culture says work can fulfill me. As an unavoidably cultural being, I've chased that dream for thirty years. Conclusion: I think my culture is wrong on this point. While a lucky few may experience something close to fulfillment in their work, there are always issues, problems, setbacks, and flaws. And for the less-lucky many (like me), work falls far short. If reality inevitably fails this dream, why do we keep dreaming?
I suspect it’s because every human being, to some degree or another, longs for the satisfaction, the completion, the wholeness of the Parousia. It’s just that we lack the will and spiritual vision to lodge this longing in the right place. Instead, we subvert it, channeling it into activities that can’t bear its weight. My form of such idolatry has been work and accomplishment, but it takes myriad forms, including the pursuit of money, power, food, romance, sex, and art, to name just a few. As John Calvin put it, the human heart is a veritable “factory of idols.”
Zechariah and Elizabeth
And yet. And yet.
Consider the story of Zechariah and Elizabeth—the “other” Advent story in Luke 1. Like Sarah, in the book of Genesis, Elizabeth had been unable to bear children and was beyond the normal age to do so. As many translations put it, she was “barren.”
There are practical reasons Elizabeth and her husband, Zechariah, might lament this barrenness. Without children, there’d be no one to care for them in their old age, no heir to bear the family name and property, and none of the joy of raising children.
But I suspect their heaviest burden was the cultural stigma that came with barrenness in first century Judaism. Since God had the power to open and close wombs, barrenness was tantamount to accursedness. Elizabeth and Zechariah’s longing for a child must have felt deep and desperate.
So, what does God do? Against the grain of human biology, God grants them a son, John the Baptist, the prophet and forerunner of Messiah Jesus. God answered their culturally-conditioned longings in the culturally-approved way: God gave them a child.
Virtue as Ordered Love
This old story speaks to me. I don't know whether Elizabeth and Zechariah’s yearnings leaned idolatrous. But the story does give me hope that God might yet open the door to publishing, despite the fact I (sometimes) load my writing life with too much baggage.
Just as having a child is a good thing, writing and publishing remain good things. The answer is not to jettison the good things we tend to idolize. Rather, as Augustine might put it, the answer is to “properly order” our love for such things, which, for Augustine, is to take on virtue, to form good character.
Easier said than done. In this age between Advents, properly ordered love—a balanced love for good things that doesn’t mistake them for the Parousia—will always be a struggle. Alongside the gracious and mysterious work of the Spirit, ordering our loves requires the practice of spiritual disciplines—not least among them, waiting.
Waiting shows me I can live without the good thing I wait for. I won't die without a publishing deal. Over time, this waiting shrinks my beloved object down to size, properly ranking its love below that for God, and thereby affords me a healthier, happier desire.
But what of waiting for God? The Advent lesson is not that we can live without God. Rather, Advent waiting teaches us to cope without the Parousia, to go on without God’s manifest presence and its promise of all things right. In short, Advent waiting grows in us a master virtue essential to this tense age between, the virtue by which we cling to the hidden-for-now God, whom we’ll one day see—that virtue we call faith.