Hopes and Fears of All the Years

I’ve been thinking a lot about the nature of longing.  

This has made for awkward holiday gatherings with typical mid-forties peers who neither work in a church nor regularly attend one. When they ask, ‘So what have you been up to?’, the interior and spiritual dialogues that feel normal during Advent sometimes don’t hold up when others simply want to know if you have decorated your Christmas tree yet. Depending on the audience, it is sometimes fun to throw a doozy their way: I’ve been considering the nature of hope. Or, I’ve been tied up with apocalyptic rhetoric. I’m spending a lot of time wondering about the hyperfixation of our culture with the chronos of marketable holidays. In related news, I usually can redeem my awkwardness by bringing good cookies for the host’s table. 

In particular, though, I’ve been thinking about longing within our family. My children have, in the past, negotiated within the framework of want, need, and hope when it comes to desiring something or looking ahead. Santa asks, “What do you want for Christmas?” I ask my tween, “What do you hope will happen this week at school?” I tell both my children, “You need to wear a hat; it’s freezing outside.” 

Longing is different. There is an element of sadness to it, a tinge of melancholy. It is about noticing both what you want and understanding the possibility that it will simply not be. I think of the lines in many of our Christmas carols, which trade images of festive sweaters for something deeper—perhaps nowhere more clearly than in one of the most powerful lines in our Christmas canon: “The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.”  

Hopes and fears together. In one place. In one person.  

As a parent, I am discovering that our language shifts as our children get older. As they hear and read the news. As they watch their peers and families engage with their own challenges and changes. For a few years, I felt that our role as parents was meant to be an unrelenting source of optimism. Did they fall down? Laugh and tell them they are okay! Are they worried about school? Tell them that they can do it! Scared of the dark? Open all the doors and show them that no monsters reside there! 

That has worked, but as our children grow up—as we, their parents, grow up—our language is shifting, to hold the possibility that not everything can or will be possible, and that is okay.  

Our son is now ten and has Down syndrome. As a fourth grader, he is a happy, engaging child and also growing increasingly aware that his friends who are neurotypical can do things he cannot yet. His hands and body don’t work the same way; what comes easily to his peers does not land as innately with him. He notices this—and mourns in his own way. We can see his occasional longing to have the world be as easy for him as it appears to be to others. It does not stop him from trying, and this hope, coupled with impossibility, strikes me as the very nature of Advent.  

We read about the coming of Christ into the world because we need a Christ in this world. No one needs a savior when things are humming along easily. We only make space for one, and will assign that status to whoever, if they appear to be the ‘fixer’ of all things broken in our system. 

In order to welcome Christ for the first time, and at the end time, we need to know longing. That we are not yet as we hope to be; as we want to be; as we need to be. And that lack is something which our children emotionally and developmentally discover, and which allows them to grow. It allows me to grow, too, if I let it.  

A previous bishop once told me that what God wants most from us is honesty. I keep coming back to Advent as a time of that kind of transparency: that where we are currently, and where we would like to be in the end, are still a distance away from one another. But the honesty in that acknowledgement is nothing other than holy. The holiness which will allow our longing to create a space in us ready to welcome a savior, a child, God, as we are now—imperfect, unready, and yet still the recipients of this love.