Daring to Hope

Advent is a season of hope and expectation: not just looking back through history to the incarnation event and the celebration of Christ’s first coming, but also looking forward to Christ’s return.

To hope, to actively expect the fulfilment of promised good news, is a choice and a discipline more than an emotion, particularly during times when life feels bleak. This Advent season I have been particularly struck by the profound resonance of the Morning Prayer liturgy in Common Worship, which encapsulates this sense of holy expectation:

In your tender compassion
the dawn from on high is breaking upon us
to dispel the lingering shadows of night.
As we look for your coming among us this day,
open our eyes to behold your presence […]

We feel more than excitement for the childlike innocence of Christmas; we are encouraged to enter into the holy awe and steadfast optimism that comes with setting our gaze towards the dawn.

To await Christ’s coming with hope is a conscious decision. I think of two great Modernist poets, T.S. Eliot and Y.B. Yeats. Both poets were confronted with the disconcerting unravelling of traditional structures and discourse as well as the onsetting gloom of political events in the first half of the twentieth century, and both wrote poems exploring the idea of Christ’s second coming. However, the tone of their poetic visions could not be more contrasting. In Yeat’s ‘The Second Coming’ he envisages a monstrous unravelling, a beastly horror looming on the horizon. In T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Cultivation of Christmas Trees’, he invites us to draw upon the childish awe and wonder that characterises early Christmas memories, until “The accumulated memories of annual emotion/May be concentrated into a great joy […] Because the beginning shall remind us of the end/And the first coming of the second coming”.

This Advent, as Christmas draws closer, let us make the conscious decision to dare to hope.