In Advent and Christmas, desolation and consolation reside together
This time of year, our inner landscapes can seem as bleak as the outer ones.
The days between November’s fading light and late December’s inky darkness have a severity about them, and not just because the trees are stripped bare and winter winds can come early (at least for those of us in the cooler climes of the northern hemisphere). It’s because our inner landscapes can sometimes seem as desolate as the outer ones. Achy uncertainty can blanket our spirits like a late-autumn snowstorm that covers everything in slate-gray stillness.
Advent isn’t just a season; it’s a sensibility, an aesthetic, a way of seeing and naming things truthfully. It fixes our gaze, unflinchingly if we’re willing, on the trouble in our midst and the trouble to come. Its appointed lectionary readings are sobering and often startling—at once familiar and inscrutable.
This year I’ve been thinking about the connections between Advent’s eschatology and the ecological trouble to come (along with the ecological trouble that is already here). So much of Isaiah’s vision of a redeemed future, for instance, is about transformed landscapes: blooming deserts, water in parched places, the glory and majesty of forests and mountains (35:1–7). Eschatology in the Bible isn’t abstract, it’s local (Lebanon, Carmel, Sharon), topographical, and arboreal.
