Advent is the name the church gives to the four weeks before Christmas. It is a time of preparation and a time of waiting. But do we know how to wait? You bet we do. We do it all the time. But aren’t we rubbish at it. We hate it. In fact, whatever we can do to avoid it – taking a shortcut, driving to work at an unsocial hour, buying online, paying for speedy boarding, whatever it is…we are there and doing it. But Advent is about making a virtue out of the waiting, it is about really really doing it well.

It's about looking for God and hoping for God, and waiting for God, …in a situation where God's presence, his promises, his embrace of our world, is ambiguous, is not yet proven. And that is part of our human life. To live in this intermediate world, neither Heaven nor Hell, neither all good or all bad, with its contradictions, its frustrations, its moments of absolute pain and its moments of absolute glory.

So we wait…because we don’t yet know. We don’t get the big picture. We don’t get God’s vision. We only see a tiny bit. The waiting is where we deal with all the things we don’t know about God - what theologians call the “epistemological distance”, that gap of knowing, between creature and creator, between the object and the subject, between the human and the divine. That part of us that only sees bits, pieces, the mess on the back of the tapestry and not the beautiful picture on the other side.

And it is at Advent that we can cultivate that discipline. A time to put a check on our rush to the happy ending, a time to hear the angel’s message, a time to abide in the fields, a time to follow a star, a time to wait on God. “Now, we see only in part”, wrote St Paul. “We see in a mirror darkly”. And while we do, we bide our time. We wait.

Click 'More Info' below to see a recitation of Rowan Williams 'Advent Calendar'