Mary and Joseph watched uncertainly as a grizzled grandpa hobbled across the courtyard towards them.
For a long time he stared at their baby. The wrinkles at the corners of his eyes filled with the tears of those who have waited decades without any proof beyond their God’s love. Slowly, tenderly, Simeon reached for the baby boy, cradling him like a long-sought treasure.
“O, Lord! You can let me go now. I have lived to see you keep your promise at last!”
He set his gnarled hand atop Jesus’s head and began a strange blessing, something about swords and saviors.
As he spoke, Mary and Joseph glanced at each other, marveling. Would miraculous strangeness mark their entire parenting journey?
The surprises weren’t finished. The old prophetess Anna was already shuffling over.
Busy or Sad or Both
Thousands of years forward and halfway round the world, I long to bring Anna and Simeon’s wisdom into the Advent our family will experience.
7- and 9-years-old, my kids sprawl on the rug by the fireplace, reading, while I stare off into the fire. Our living-room smells of cedar boughs, my kitchen of simmered cider. It’s a moment of stillness in a season too often hurried or anxious. I read Luke 2 again and again, soaking up all I can of these two Temple blessers. I want to live as they did.
Advent, or “arrival,” is a time in the church calendar dedicated to meditation on the coming of Christ. It is to be marked by contemplation, candlelight, and hymns of hopeful waiting. I love that idea, and so each year I tell myself, “We are going to spend this season peacefully. My family and I are going to contemplate the heck out of Advent.”
Then we get mighty busy. The stretch between Thanksgiving chugs into New Year like a five-engine diesel train gaining speed and we arrive at January panting and spent.
Our busyness comes from good things. We dash from choir rehearsal for the church hymn sing to the block party gift exchange, squeezing in packing for travel and finishing the financial quarter at work. We are blessed. Community, work, and abundance cram our calendars. And we are gearing up to celebrate the very best thing: Christ has come to earth. Rejoice, o weary world!
Yet I cannot be the only one to sense the wistful strain of a minor key beneath the jangle of jingle bells. The season surrounding Christmas, that time of togetherness and good will, can also highlight people we’ve lost – whether to illness and age, or relationships sacrificed to the polarized opinions of this cultural moment.
Our kids feel the holidays’ mixed nature too. When, beneath the joviality, family gatherings grow tense with old wounds or new divisions, our children look from face to face, wondering uneasily if they did something wrong. Or it’s nothing to do with tensions and everything to that fact that Holiday Season overlaps neatly with Germs Everywhere season. School absences and canceled plans pile up like used Kleenex.
We can be frank: Advent has never been one long strand of undimmed twinkle lights. It’s always been complex, leaning towards hope but tinged with melancholy. Sometimes, in these early dark and bone-cold winter days, our hearts mirror nature’s emptiness.
Anna and Simeon Point the Way
A couple simple Advent practices, anchored in the stories of Simeon and Anna in Luke 2, can speak to both the whirl of activity and the ache.
Don’t worry, I’m not going to add anything to our to-do list. We don’t have to buy a special calendar or bake twenty tins of cookies, start a new devotional, or touch everything you own and then get rid of whatever doesn’t spark joy.
Rather than giving us more things to do, Anna and Simeon offer us a couple ways to be.
To be intimately honest in our longings.
To be prayerfully present in our chaos.
Honest in Our Longing
Perhaps hurry is not the hallmark of the season for you, but depression is, or loneliness or bitterness frustration or grief. Another year closes without bringing us whatever we were waiting for.
Our sense of yearning during winter holidays is nothing strange to God’s people. For centuries the Old Testament prophets promised a glorious Messiah to come. Then they sat down and clammed up. For 400 years between the last messianic prophecy and the arrival of Jesus, the Jewish people waited and longed. Meanwhile, foreigners took over their cities, replaced their government, disrupted their identity, and ravaged their wealth.
We, too, have sustained losses. Maybe the Roman empire hasn’t taken over our lives. That doesn’t mean we don’t have anything to mourn. Myself, I’ve felt the political fault lines more keenly than ever, stopped short in conversations with dear friends as we suss out just what we can talk about, and what territory might be land-minded now.
There is such a grief to this. We’ve barely begun to reckon with it. Yet we exist in a culture deeply uncomfortable with prolonged sadness.
In many Christian communities, we are anxious when someone shares a sad tale without an accompanying, “But at least…” We want so badly to testify to God’s faithfulness – and to reassure our brothers and sisters – that we forget to make space for lament, for yearning.
But Simeon, of Luke 2, is not shy about yearning. He was “righteous and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel.” Think about that phrase, waiting for the consolation.
It strikes me that Simeon did spend his wait hustling to bring about his own consolation. Neither did he ignore his or his people’s pain. He didn’t grit his teeth and knuckle through, shrug and make the best of it, or manufacture a silver lining.
Simeon waited and longed for God to work. He was waiting for consolation, a tender word that brings to mind images of a distraught infant wailing for his mother. Even in his moment of triumphant exultation, when he sees the Redeemer at last, Simeon references how deep was his ache.
“Now you are letting your servant depart in peace,” he says in Luke 2:29, “For my eyes have seen your salvation.” Simeon is saying, in essence, that the only reason he is still alive is his desperation to see God work.
We desperately need God’s consoling comfort, and we need it now. Yet often, we are given to wait.
Do you know how hard it is just to wait? I can’t even wait in line at the grocery store without pulling out my phone to distract myself! Waiting for more significant things is even tougher. It can feel painful, even somehow embarrassing, to say:
“No, we’re still not pregnant.”
“No, thanks for asking, but I haven’t heard back about the job yet.”
“Unfortunately no, my brother and sister still haven’t reconciled. They spent Thanksgiving glowering.”
Sometimes we find it easier to smoosh the hope down. Easier to kill the small sprout of desire than nurture it along without seeing any fruit.
Yet God invites us to bring him our heart’s holes. He is intimately acquainted with our sorrow. He is the most comfortable of friends to sit beside as we rage or weep.
Do we give ourselves room to acknowledge our unfulfilled desires to the Lord? Do we give our kids room to express their own unresolved sorrows? This Advent, we might brave the kind of emotional honesty with God that Simeon demonstrates.
“Lord, why have we still not gotten a diagnosis? I’m scared.”
“Honey, I notice you’re sounding frustrated. Want to tell me more?”
The next few months may hold unfulfilled promises. God makes space for us to tell him how we really feel, mad, sad, the works, and we, in turn, can give our kids space to express their longings and frustrations. We can embrace the intimacy of admitting our feelings before they are resolved.
When we are honest about our dearest desires, submitting them to God rather denying them or trying to fulfil them ourselves, we practice Simeon’s faithful Advent watch.
Prayerfully Present in the Chaos
Barely has Simeon finished his speech when another of the temple old folks, Anna, creaks up to join the group.
She’s been a widow far longer than a bride; the woman knows how to talk to God. Somehow, even in the chaos of temple life, she hears from God, too.
Now, beaming down at the wee Messiah, her face aglow with delight, Anna blesses the baby, and none too quietly. Her wait is over. Anna is pumped. She shouts the good news to anyone and everyone who would listen.
For decades after losing her husband, Anna has spent all her time at the temple. But lest you imagine the first century temple of Jerusalem as a silent retreat, where Anna moves peacefully through her days murmuring psalms, consider a few realities:
- Moneychangers did a brisk business just outside
- Romans soldiers marched nearby, keeping a sharp eye out for zealots
- Inside, priests chanted psalms and liturgies out loud, with musical accompaniment
- Thousands of oxen, sheep, pigeons, and goats were slaughtered daily
- Herod’s workers were constantly at work building additions
Can you envision the constant hustle and hassle?
Can you hear the clamor of hammers pounding, coins clinking, goats bleating, priests singing, circumcised babies wailing, cymbals crashing, beggars shouting, and pilgrims babbling?
Underneath the swirl of every day activity, can you feel the current of anxiety and anger of an oppressed people fomenting rebellion?
Herod’s temple of first century Jerusalem was not a quiet place or a simpler time. Yet we see Anna plunk herself down in the middle of this sensory overload. Luke 2:37 says Anna “never left the temple but worshiped night and day, fasting and praying.”
She does not avoid the chaos. She dwells prayerfully, physically within it.
Anna brings her body to her worship. She fasts, offering her rhythms of eating and not eating up to God as a spiritual act of worship. She prays day and night, offering her rhythms of sleeping and waking for His use. And, most simply, she is physically present to the people of God.
One way we can practice a simpler Advent is to head into the busyness with our prayers and our bodies fully engaged.
In our feasting, we can thank God for the textures of Christmas fudge and the aroma of eggnog, teaching our children to taste and see that the Lord is good! In our fasting, we can offer God empty bellies and ask him to bring his fullness.
As we get up with sick kids in the night or kneel on the carpet to read with to them, we can whisper, “Father, receive this as worship.” In the airport line or stuck in road trip traffic, we can invite our kids to pray with us for the people we’re about to see.
After the distancing of the pandemic, joining physically with each other is a most poignant privilege. We can gather in church and home, singing our lungs out in side-by-side praise.
Thus even the crammed calendar turns into a temple, the place we meet with and serve God in holy embodiment. When we are fully present to our people and experiences amidst the busyness, we prepare the way for Christ just as Anna did.
Both Simeon and Anna found all they were hoping for. Not through striving; Christ was carried to them, at just the right time, in another’s arms. He comes to us in surprising moments – in the car between rehearsals, to our living room in a moment of quiet, even as we measure out another dose of medicine.
As we enter this season of weeping and whirlwind, may God grant us Anna’s way of being prayerfully present in the chaos. May He give us Simeon’s blunt honesty about all we are aching to see God do. And may we celebrate, along with our children, the arrival of the One who is surpassingly worth the wait.
Featured image: Rembrandt’s Simeon and Anna in the Temple (1627–1628)
She has written for Christianity Today, Roads & Kingdoms, Story Warren, and more. Jeannie is currently writing a book on embodied delight. Find her on Twitter @JeannieWhitlock, or at her blog on expat parenting, Roots in the Road.
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Amazing with so many relatable, but also profound, truths!
Thank you my dear!!