When living in Oregon during the eruption of Mount St. Helens in May 1980, I received with skepticism the predictions that shoots of green would sprout through the ash by the following spring. How could that be? Plumes of volcanic dust had been so pervasive; ash still lined windowsills and doorways as far as Portland. And aerial photos of the mountain were dismaying: her beautiful peak gone and life along her sides reduced to ashes.
But the predictors were correct. Apparently, ash and rubble make good fertilizer, and the “burn” of a forest, whether natural or man-made, is a fine way to keep it healthy. It wasn’t long before Mount St. Helens, albeit with a new profile, was lush and lovely again.
We are in such a period now, particularly insofar as the restoration of seasonal traditions. Last year, in 2020, everything truly was blown up and blackened out. Families could not gather and, especially tragically, people could not sit with beloved relatives in the hospital. Church services, unless online, were cancelled. Christmas pageants and parties were forbidden. A few arts organizations offered virtual concerts, but the effect was mixed at best.
Here we stand, though, at the start of Advent 2021, rejoicing as new shoots have sprouted. Life in many places has returned nearly to normal.
Yet again dark rumblings threaten our budding hope. Dire predictions about a new virus threaten to quash people’s mobility. In addition, new twists of horror are being inflicted upon budding moments of joy, as evidenced in the devastation wreaked on a sweet Wisconsin Christmas parade where a sick and dangerous individual plowed down the tender bodies of children and seniors engaged in creating joy. How does one recover from that, either as an individual or as a society?
Still, history shows us that people do recover. Traditional expressions of joy do return, even if it takes a very long time. I recall the wizened faces of babushki at a concert in Leningrad in 1981. They stood in the back of the balcony, behind the last row of seats, tears streaming down their faces as they listened to the professional Glinka Choir perform masterpieces of sacred music with the actual sacred words (as opposed to Soviet pablum). These were the very pieces they remembered singing in church choirs in their own childhood. It would be a few more years before Communism fell and the Russian churches after 1990 could rebuild freely, but the promise of renewal floated on each note. The wait had been nearly 73 years.
I think too of the horrific attack in 2016 of a prominent Christmas Market in Berlin next to the significant Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedänkniskirche (Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church). This kind of attack has since been imitated in differing forms on holiday markets across Europe, although a few plots have been uncovered and foiled, thankfully.
When that first Christmas-market attack happened, though, people said it would end the vibrant tradition of European open-air markets. (At that point, we in America were clinging to a false belief that such things could never happen here.)
But the festive markets survived, albeit with changes in security and access to the squares. Markets have survived even the pandemic. Tomorrow, I fly to meet my first Smithsonian Journey’s group since COVID to begin a Rhine-River Christmas Market tour, sailing from Düsseldorf to Basel. Certain restrictions will be in place, and we may miss a thing or two. But it seems we are going!
In a sermon on the First Sunday of Advent, the rector of St. Timothy’s Episcopal in Winston-Salem, Fr. Steve Rice, spoke forcefully about the difference between wishes and hope. In an age of instant access and instant gratification, we expect immediate solutions and have little patience for delays. This is one reason we are so puzzled by an ongoing threat to public health that shows no signs of a definite end.
He contrasted those observations with several verses from the Bible and Charles Wesley’s hymn: Come Thou Long Expected Jesus. We moderns grumble when Amazon Prime takes three days, rather than two (to use his example). How can we grasp what “long-expected” meant to the displaced Hebrew slaves wandering in the desert?
To be fair, twenty-one months of nearly complete disruption of life is not insignificant. False promises have come and gone, particularly for those believing the answer would come in a pharmaceutical formula or a logistical rearranging of daily operations. Even more discouraging is a fact that affects everyone: whenever an attempt to discuss the pandemic reasonably pokes its head through the rubble, strong, even hostile, opinions stomp down upon those tender shoots. We need to drink in and cherish the words “hope” and “long-expected.” We also need to protect the tender shoots of optimism that have begun to poke their green leaflets above the ruins.
If certain traditions frame your life at Advent and Christmastide, do not abandon them. Enhance them in whatever way you can. Seek to find ways that dismaying obstacles can become creative or reflective endeavors. Try to think of it all as training in spiritual endurance.
Above all, remember that good things rarely come quickly. Nor do they come in the form we expect. Perhaps that’s what fuels the wisdom of old folks who speak almost wistfully of hard times. My own parents looked back at World War II with a curious nostalgia, primarily because they were passionately engaged in keeping a business going while my dad was in the Army. To hear them talk, these years seemed to be their happiest, something that puzzled me greatly as a child.
It’s too early to apply nostalgia to the slings and arrows of 2020 and 2021. We cannot see the end, although we can hope for it with steadfastness. Meanwhile, both common sense and biblical admonition instruct us to be of good cheer. We can lean upon that marvelous couplet of Wesley’s hymn:
From our fears and sins release us,
Let us find our rest in thee.