It comes before Christmas, and that is practically all that is commonly known of the Season of Advent. In many churches, most will take note of the Advent Wreath, a bough of green with four candles: three, violet, one pink. Twice a year—on the third Sunday of Advent and on the fourth Sunday of Lent—the liturgy recommends a very peculiar color: “old rose” is how it officially goes, but pink is what it has become in present-day versions of liturgical habiliment. It is the color of joy and exaltation in a season of sobriety. And for many, if not most Catholics, the advent wreath is not an advent symbol, but an early piece of Christmas decor, like the Filipino puts up his Christmas tree as soon as the “-ber” months march in. But apart from this, there is not too much that many will say about Advent.
The air is thick and heavy with hate these days. So many hate the Marcoses for having buried the family patriarch with the solemnity by which every son or daughter would like a father laid to rest. Many are angry at De Lima for having had an affair with Dayan and for what is not yet in fact known for sure—that she had something to do with the frightening drug trade at the national penitentiary. There is seething anger at the members of the Lower House who skewered Ronnie Dayan—whom they called a “resource person”—apparently more interested in the juicy details of his romantic liaison with his former boss rather than how he proved de Lima’s culpability, and for displaying what many take to be shameless misogyny. Christmas is around the corner, but it is not in the air. Anger, agitation, restiveness and resentment are the smog of the season.
Advent is the season given to reflection on ends: the end of life, the end of time, the end of history. And the images conjured by the liturgical readings of the season are a mix of the terrifying and the inspiring. There are apocalyptic visions of terrible portents in the sky, on earth and in the seas but there are also reassuring and comforting metaphors of homecoming after a period of exile and the definite establishment of a kingdom of justice, peace and love. “End” itself is two things at once: It is closure, what prevents something from meaningless and utterly pointless perdurance and repetition; but it is also purpose, goal, that which gives any venture direction, purpose and sense! It should then not be surprising that we get mixed symbols: symbols of the forbidding—for the end of an established order, the scheme of things to which we are habituated, the “world” of our “worlded” existences is always threatening, always apocalyptic, and symbols of promise and of fulfillment—the new heavens and the new earth, not a re-run of an old show!
Advent relativizes our obsessions. In its call for sobriety, it makes us see that the raging issues of the day that now we take to be either our making or unmaking will be irrelevant, impertinent perhaps even hilarious and silly at some later time. To look at things sub specie aeterni…with eternity as backdrop, that is what makes us laugh at our own self-importance, disposes us to be more forgiving of failings—those of others and our own, and at the same time more courageous about doing what may, for the moment, be scorned, reviled and shamed for, in the end, the judgments men and women give are subject to the ultimate revision of Final Judgment. The scorn and spite of earth do not determine the meaningfulness or meaninglessness of what we do, just as it is for none to say of another that he or she has been “evil” and “sinful” by a pronouncement that has eternal validity!
A people that wallows in hate and bathes in the elements of its own collective resentment is in danger of losing the capacity to hope—the virtue of the Advent Season. To hope, Gabriel Marcel towards the middle of the preceding century, is not to expect, for what one expects, one calculates. Hope is beyond all calculation. It defies calculation. One hopes without making demands. Hope is not confined to the targets of one’s aspirations. Hope is seeing light at the end of a long, dark and forbidding tunnel, knowing not what lies at the end. Hope is repose. And so it is that hope is looking beyond our hating, hateful, resenting and resentful selves. Hope, says popular philosopher John Caputo, is giving our fiat to the God of the Impossible. Hope is lighting that candle in our hearts that reminds us to be vigilant about the Advent of One whose love offers the promise that no hate ever can. It is the sobering but also joyful reminder that there is a kingdom to come that does not depend on the count of our fickle choices but is so much more that what eye has ever seen, ear has ever heard or anything at all that has ever occurred to us and our troubled spirits!
