Advent this year, like a lot of things, "hits different" (as the cool kids say).
The idea of waiting in hopeful expectation: is it Jesus we await, or a vaccine and life "going back to normal" (though there are no shortage of people willing to tell us that "normal" was not very good for many people, and so, I guess, we should feel guilty for wanting the lives we had back? I don't know).
And yes, perhaps, some would say this has been a time of afflicting the otherwise-comfortable, except that people who have had great discomfort have it even WORSE (e.g: the fact that BIPOC people are more likely to get seriously ill with COVID and less likely to get good care, and that a lot of low-paid "essential" workers have had to drive trucks and stock shelves and deal with people yelling at them through this). And also:
Yeah. I need comfort too, even though I'm arguably one of the comfortable: I have a roof over my head and enough money for my needs, and if caseloads got worse I could work from home, even though I found that tremendously isolating and unpleasant this spring.
But the idea of waiting in expectation.
Advent and waiting for an "end" to this is very different.
One thing I noticed as an adult: when I was a kid, the "days until Christmas" seemed to take FOREVER. Like, December 1, when we put up the Advent calendar, felt like eons from the day when we'd get to open presents. But as an adult, I realize that Advent is really fast - and most years, the day after Christmas, when the expectation in the US is "everything goes back to 'normal'" - I would find myself saying "but I didn't have enough TIME to enjoy it thoroughly."
I suppose that's the difference between being a kid - especially a kid in a family where "new toys" and the like were rare (pretty much only Christmas and birthdays) and so the chance to acquire loomed large, and being an adult when experiences - and especially SHARED experiences, I realize that this year - are the important thing.
So most years as an adult I feel like "I don't want it to be over yet!"
Most years.
I don't know how this year will be.
Already I am feeling the month of December as a long, dark blank, or maybe as a tunnel I will have to walk through alone. Last night, one of the AAUW women called me - I already knew why, as the person who had been hosting the Zoom meetings, I e-mailed the president and asked her: "I know we can't have a party this year, and we did talk about doing a "drop in" Zoom meeting, but I'm going to be busy with grading and preparing for the memorial service Friday, do we still want to do this?" and the consensus with her and the other officers was "no, let's try again to do a Zoom meeting in the new year"
And anyway: Caroline called me "even though I'm sure you know already" and she signed off by wishing me a Merry Christmas and I was like "golly day, it's only the first of December" and again I felt the same as I did when one of my colleagues set off for the city his family actually lives in with a cheery "I'll see you all in January....maybe..." and I felt very alone and very unmoored from all the groups I was a part of.
Yes, yes, church; but that feels sad and strange when you can't shake people's hands and are seeing them masked and from 6' away.
There was one of the more Advent-y Christmas songs I heard the other day, I can't even remember which one it was or what the exact words were, but it was something along the lines of (not exactly this quotation) the people who walked in darkness have seen a great light, and I realized that some of the lyrics about expectation and hope and waiting are also very much about many of our secular-lives* states right now, where we are watching the slow process of vaccine approval and distribution, and wondering when we can get it**
(NO I remember now: "A thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices" Which fits both the vaccine news and, for Christians, the news of the coming Birth)
(*And yes, arguably, you cannot separate the secular part of your day-to-day life from the sacred part of it, if you take your faith at all seriously)
(**and I also admit, as someone with a tetchy immune system and a lot of allergies, I also fear just so slightly that I, personally, may have a bad reaction to it. I may make arrangements for someone to check in on me every day - or maybe more than once a day - after I get it, and to call the EMS if I don't answer - just in case, you know. Oh, I know, intellectually, some 35,000 people have had it already and the worst side effects seem to be a general ramping-up of the immune system like you see after a particularly powerful flu shot, but still.)
But this "time in the wilderness" so to speak (and yes, I know, that's more of a Lenten thing, but I've also heard Advent referred to as Lent-light) has been hard, all the harder because we don't know for sure when it will end - or even, really, what that end will look like. Things may never get fully back like they were before; we may wind up only going to the movie theater masked in the future. Or we may lose so many small businesses that there will be much less diversity of things, and we will really wind up with some kind of Conglomomart that most of us have to buy from. (Then again: Etsy. Maybe things like Etsy will keep going and I admit I love that kind of online marketplace even more now)
Also I think a lot of us are just tired, and are hungering and thirsting after different things. There was some discussion on Twitter yesterday about "if the pandemic magically disappeared tomorrow, what would you do?" and the original poster cynically said "Sleep. you would sleep because you are all sleep deprived" but I KNOW if I knew FOR SURE that it was safe to travel again, I would buy the first train ticket I could get to Illinois to go visit my mom; I could sleep on the train. And then we would go to every nice restaurant in town and go out shopping and I would buy her new shoes to replace the ones I know that she's still wearing even though they're kind of worn out, and we would go visit people. And then when I got back home I would call up all my friends within a day's drive of me and make plans to go visit each one and do fun things where they lived.
Though I admit, by 9:30 that night, my desires had shrunk very small: I said one thing I really just wanted? To go to an old-school diner and have a plate of pancakes. Yes, pancakes and maybe sausage and an egg on the side, just go in a place and sit down and have a waitress who maybe calls me "hon" come and take my order, and bring my food to me, and take the plates away again when I was done. I grow so weary each day of looking at the food I have in the house and trying to envision what to make with it, and I admit I've not been eating as healthfully as I might because I am just so tired of caretaking for myself. (And yes, I know: I COULD go to a restaurant, ours are open, but I think it's monumentally unwise to right now. And yes, there is carry out, but most of the places that do carry out, the food either isn't very good, or it's not very good for me, and there's only so much of that I can eat before my stomach rebels a little)
But I don't know. Yes, I know that Advent and Lent are times for reflection and spiritual housecleaning and maybe the sense of "after this it will be different" but I find as I slide into this year's Advent I am simply tired and worn and I feel like I've been "reflecting" (or probably more correctly, "ruminating") for these past however-many months. What I want is to DO again, and not to have to sit and think and weigh risks and also find myself turning over the rough pebbles of less-then-ideal human interactions I've had in my mind because they are all I've got to think about. I need SOMETHING, but I am not sure it is more time staring into my soul or wandering in the wilderness.
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