Bishop Anderson Jeremiah reflects on Advent as a radical invitation to wait in an age of instant gratification. Through nature’s rhythms, Isaiah’s prophetic vision, and the paradox of life and death, he calls us to shed what is old, embrace vulnerability, and awaken to grace. Advent becomes a season of hope, renewal, and divine presence breaking into our world.
In this age of instant gratification, I find myself deeply contemplating a forgotten art: the praxis of waiting. It feels alien to the human condition now. I was visiting a primary school today and the children even suggested that waiting could be frustrating, stressful and annoying. Yet, Advent, by its very nature, is foregrounded in this waiting—a waiting without complete understanding, a waiting filled with deep anticipation, a waiting to make sense and to truly understand.
There is a sense of being thrown into a whirlwind, with nothing stable to hold onto. Much like the prophets, for those who seek justice and pursue compassion, the social and institutional realities might feel like entering a long, cold winter of spiritual hibernation. How do we sustain life, love, and faith when the moral landscape is so debilitating?
In this state, it is easy to see only death and sin all around us, but it is in the act of re-orienting our sense that we begin to perceive life. Holding together contradictions and paradoxes forces us to make the vital space for us to make sense of our lives and orient ourselves towards Christ.
Lessons from nature: shedding to renew
Consider the starkness of late autumn as we walk: the empty branches, seemingly dying. My daughter pointed this out recently. But as we know so well, this is the profound resiliency of plants—they shed their leaves to preserve life, to be able to blossom in the spring. This is the very act of Advent: waiting, shedding, and emptying oneself of the old self that has muddled our awareness of the divine presence within us and around us. It is in this Advent waiting that we can shed our old selves and prepare afresh to encounter the God of life. It is a cycle of loss and renewal, life and death. Indeed, death is not the opposite of life; it is the full process of life itself.
Isaiah speaks powerfully to such a context. The Prophet Isaiah (11:1-10) saw a divine disruption and a world remade. His vision was unflinching; it takes courage to hear it. As we hear in the first few chapters, Isaiah saw the bruises, the sores, the bleeding wounds-a desolate country, burned cities, and Zion left like a besieged stronghold. He saw God sickened by self-congratulatory offerings. In such a concerning context, Isaiah might have started by immediately laying into the injustices. And, yes, he does deliver a firm denunciation. He calls out the inhabitants of Jerusalem for devouring the vineyard, claiming the spoils of the poor, for ‘crushing [the] people, by grinding the face of the poor,’ (3:15) and for their arrogance. He sees their complicity and injustice.
Yet, with all that clarity, Isaiah does not start with the denunciation.
There is something more powerful, something more important, something ultimate. Isaiah starts with HOPE. “A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse”.
As we journey through Advent, a time of uncertain waiting, let us pray for a divine balm to heal the gaping wounds afflicting both the Church and society, that restoration might happen from the inside out.
A call to embrace waiting
The redemption promised through Advent calls us to a new, collective orientation. To be a creature of Advent is to become comfortable with the lived experience of surprise—the surprise that births forth an awakening to grace, which itself is realized through the praxis of waiting.
May we embrace this season of waiting, shed what is old, and re-orient our lives toward the ultimate hope that Isaiah proclaimed.
One evening when the bursting red
December sun draws up the sheet
And penny-masks its eye to yield
The star-snowed fields of sky.
He will come, will come
Will come like a crying in the night,
Like bold, like breaking,
As the earth writhes to toss him free
He will come like a child.
(Rowan Williams, Advent Calendar)