Every Advent witnesses the gruesome reanimation of the voice that whispers “you know , Christmas is just a pagan holiday…” with that sort of conversational ellipsis that does not so much invite further reflection but halts and forecloses it. The claims are several and equally spurious: Jesus wasn’t born on the 25th, it’s really just an ancient [INSERT CIVILIZATION] practice, it’s just the winter solstice, it’s gone too commercial, it’s become an idol in its own right, Christianity is not about the manger it’s about the Cross, etc.

[…] it is not without meaning that Jesus prays this prayer of desire in a garden, at night. For he is the true and greater Adam, in a Garden, in the cold of the (very early) morning […]

In particular, I want to consider “glory” as a thing that shapes the quality of Christian waiting. The Nicene Creed teaches us that Christ will not merely come again, but that “He will come again in glory…” And this word “glory” is more than an imaginative lacquer applied to the otherwise dull and rasping theology of the creeds. It is substantial.

For to hope is to suffer. Hoping means waiting. And for mortals waiting is a source of intense suffering. Jean Amery suggested that “space” and “time” were two key features of our passage through life. Waiting, hoping, is to forfeit both space and time. We don’t “move-on”. Rather we keep the vigil at the bedside of our longings. Standing still, remaining hopeful, is in some sense to suffer the loss of the potential opportunities and potentialities we could experience if we just gave up. “Curse God and die” is the suggestion of Job’s wife, which is to say “stop all this waiting —all this hoping— just end the story already, for I no longer have the stomach to watch it play-out any longer.” The pain of hope is embodied in the shards of pottery that Job uses to lance the boils that benight him as he sits in burlap and ashes.

Perhaps we might consider the ways in which, during Advent, its not so much that the branches are hung on the church, but rather that the church hangs on them —hangs our hopes, corporate and personal, on the promises of the Branch-King Jesus.

Under the yoke of bondage in Egypt the House of Israel groaned. And Yahweh heard them and set them free from the house of slavery. Out of their pain they raised a loud cry. Understand: they made their pain eloquent; they gave it voice.

But what, one might wonder, if Pharaoh had had at his disposal, the entertainment-media and pharmacological industries we boast of in the west? What would have become of the groaning of Israel in Egypt?

Kimbell Kornu cites Jonathan Edwards to the effect that, “One alone, without any reference to any more, cannot be excellent” (Edwards 1980, 337; as quoted by Kornu, 2014, 46). Which is to say that the goodness of the Unity of God (his oneness) is mutually dependent upon his plurality, (his trinity). His Unity is a real unity of persons, and not a mere abstract formula that could be summarized: “x=1”. The God of the Bible, the One surpasses the parameters of the Platonic One, is therefore necessarily a unity of plural excellency; a primordial agreement of Persons so eternally unified that even the numeric value ascribed to “1” is too inaccurate an evaluation. He is more fully Unified than “x=1”. And yet, the plurality must be maintained or else the One ceases to be the Good. For it is is not good to be alone.

Death is a scary feature of human life. Especially in modernity where we have been almost-but-not-quite-promised that we can escape it. Through various forms of control, artifice, or prosthesis, we play a long and hard fought game to attain this glimmering hebel of being unkillable and undying… yunno, like every single wicked sorcerer in every single children’s fairy tale. The upshot of all of this is that, as a culture, we try to eschew the things that remind us of death or make us aware of our mortality: the sick, the poor, the homeless, the problems we can’t solve, children because they age us. Social forces may exalt one of the aforementioned cases and wave it for a time in an abstract and sociological way but only usually insofar as to “fix” the problem it presents to our pursuit of deathless health. The result is a kind of isolation and loneliness existent prior to the lockdowns (though definitely acerbated by them). “Within our frenetic necrophobia we flee death…” says Peter Leithart. And yet, there is grim irony here: that in order to preserve life we sacrifice it. Again, Leithart notes that “to elevate bare life as the supreme value we have to make the supreme sacrifice of life itself. And so we flee from death and find ourselves rushing to deaths embrace, strangely comforted. Our necrophobia becomes necrophilia.”

To be “human” means to come from the ground (from the Latin noun humus “earth”, and the Latin verb humare “to burry”) . It was from the earth that the Lord formed Adam (Gen 2.7). And in the Fall we are told that it is to the earth that we shall return (Gen 3.19).

And while this is biblically true, it is also culturally true. Since as long as we have been “human” (setting aside the debate about how long that length has been) we have been compelled to burry the dead —and, barring any community transgression— to burry our dead with ceremony.

“[I]t was steam-power, not binary code, that birthed the modern news industry” writes Jeffrey Bilbro (11). The application of steam technology to the faculties of printed media transformed the news in the early 19th century. Prior to the 1830s “the modern relationship between the press and the urban populace had yet to emerge” David Henkin explains in his contribution to The City in American Literature and Culture (27). There were small press publications whose readership was relatively small, elite, literate, and whose lifestyles afforded the leisure for the focused attention demanded by pre-“news-revolution” writing.