Cultural Amnesia and the Coming of Advent

A reflection on the importance of Advent in re-educating our culture.

"It's simply the way things are. We're not really in control."

"What?"

"We just think we're in control," my friend continued, "We're not. Experiences like this remind us of the way things are."

He was commenting on my grumbling about how difficult it was to wait on our baby's birth, with the "any day now" days dragging on. As the due date approached, there was nothing to do but wait — and get okay with waiting.

I’m bad at waiting. 

In our American society, most of us are bad at it.

But, experiences like waiting on the birth of a child, waiting on nature to do its thing, shake us to the core if we let them. Such experiences remind us of reality as it is, like a sudden memory recall that reverberates through our amnesia. Reality is this: I’m not God.

An Artificial World

Ours is a virtual world, a world of representations — a hyperreality of images of images (like imitating the computer generated dance moves of a video game). It is an artificial world run by algorithms and engineered prompts that generate engineered responses. Screens dot the landscape and media dictates life. It’s a removal of cultural distance that creates distance from the real. We are how far from the food we eat? How far from the products we buy on Amazon? To such questions one might respond: Who cares?! As long as I can get what I want when I want it, who cares?!

From climate control to birth control, we feel as though we're in charge. And, when you’re so many layers removed from reality — from the really real — it's comfortable to live an illusion. All of this allows one to more easily curate his brand and create his realest self online, as a virtual self. 

Matthew Crawford, in The World Beyond Your Head, describes our vision of technology as “the great Mommy who will respond seamlessly to [our] will and keep [us] insulated from the frustrations of a contingent world.” That sounds about right. Consequently, Crawford concludes, “we find ourselves living in a highly mediated existence.” Technology mediates life for us. Rarely do we encounter its bare nakedness. Its hardness — and harshness.

To top it off, we have no attention span. We can’t attend to much of anything that isn't in-your-face entertainment. We're all about experiences. And, if they aren't titillating, they're boring and we want nothing to do with them. You can’t even go to a baseball game without constant noise and some attention-grabbing media buffoonery sponsored by the official potato chip of your big league team between innings. 

We are impatient. We think we know what we want, and once we believe it’s an authentic feeling of want, we get it. No waiting. No messing around. One click. Two day ship. (Or, even overnight.)

There's no waiting in our manmade wonderland.

Enter Advent

How much more countercultural can a liturgical season get than Advent?

Advent invites waiting. It embraces it.

It’s the epitome of a cultural antithesis.

Advent is a season of longing, a season that abides in the painful tension between willing and getting. With Advent, we can surely say the Church is really showing her age. She's antiquated. Waiting in an “age of instant?” She’s out of touch.

To be sure, as human beings, we’ve been terrible at waiting for a long time (see Gen. 3). We hate it. We’re takers. The techno-utopianism of our present day is just the latest iteration of an ongoing problem.

It’s no wonder we tend to blow right through Advent. Push past it. 

Even as adults, we can’t wait for Christmas like kids can’t wait for presents. We have our premature Christmas parties, our Christmas music from November on, our tacky sweaters, and the like. Like everything else in our utilitarian and materialistic culture, we get Christmas-ed out. The marketing pressure around Christmas starts early and the commercialization suffocates such that it’s no wonder we chuck our trees on December 26. 

In the face of this kind of culture, the Church invites all her members to embrace an Advent season of hopeful waiting — and to remain in that tension. The liturgy itself celebrates and “makes present this ancient expectancy of the Messiah” by “sharing in the long preparation for the Savior’s first coming” (CCC 524). Why? Does she want to torture us by making us even more aware of our ache for Christmas? We typically numb all our other aches with oh so many “drugs?” Is the Church a glutton for punishment? No. The Church’s liturgical celebration of “expectancy” and “preparation” is meant to move us interiorly, that we might “renew [our] ardent desire for [Christ’s] second coming” (CCC 524). Advent reminds us of reality — namely, that we don’t control it and that we have a longing for the infinite the finite cannot satisfy. It reminds us that manufactured, virtual reality is not the real thing. We have to wait for the real thing which will come in its own time — like the birth of a baby. Hmmm.

Advent is the Church’s antidote to an artificial and impatient culture.