In CS Lewis's Narnia, the reign of the White Witch means that it is always winter and never Christmas.
In our culture, we suffer from a similar problem, except that in our case, it is always Christmas and never Advent. The secular-minded need not switch off at this point: Advent is, of course, a religious season, but it is also a season of the heart and mind, and one that is sorely needed in our chaotic, chase-our-tails world.
My father is fond of saying that it is Christmas every day now. I think he means that treats that used to be special are now taken for granted. With the notable exception of the poor, stuffing ourselves silly is a daily option for many of us rather than something that happens once a year. Toys that once would have made the eyes of children pop out on stalks are now commonplace. Gifts are exchanged for any old occasion.
Particularly in the commercial world, Advent doesn't exist. The Christmas rush starts around October.
I must have been about 16, sitting in Mrs Kenneally's wonderful, soul-nourishing English class, when I turned the pages of Soundings to Patrick Kavanagh's Advent. I don't know why that first line spoke to me so immediately and so deeply. "We have tested and tasted too much, lover./ Through a chink too wide there comes in no wonder."
God knows I had tested and tasted nothing at that stage. Far from being jaded, I was positively sheltered. Perhaps I was just at that painful cusp when childhood is about to be left behind forever, and was already mourning "the luxury of a child's soul" and the capacity to be stirred to wonder by every ordinary thing. By coincidence, around the same time, I read about a person watching a butterfly emerge from a cocoon. It seemed to be taking forever, and the butterfly seemed to be struggling. Wanting to speed up the process, the person took a razor and made a tiny nick to increase the opening.
The butterfly emerged from the cocoon, and fluttered about but could not fly. What the person did not know was that the butterfly needs to emerge slowly if the wings are to grow strong enough for flight. Its shortened life was spent on the ground; it never knew freedom, never really lived. Patrick Kavanagh was speaking metaphorically of "a chink too wide". For the butterfly, the chink was literally too wide. Impatience had made natural growth impossible.
Of all the virtues, patience and the ability to wait get short shrift in our world. Just try hesitating a second at a red light if you don't believe me, but make sure you are not feeling fragile when you try the experiment. Our culture doesn't "do" waiting. Everything has to be immediate, or preferably yesterday. Yet sometimes I feel that all our rushing leaves us staggering around, wings half-developed, unable to fly.
Advent is all about waiting. After all, it culminates in the birth of a baby, and no one yet has found a way to force a baby to develop faster. The only option is to wait, as the miraculous process proceeds at its own pace. Nor should we try to force the pace at which children grow and develop, but when rushing has not beaten my conscience into an inaudible squeak, I am often stricken to the heart to hear how often I demand that my children hurry up.
Most worthwhile change is slow. But slow drives us crazy. We want to be instantly skinny, or instantly proficient at some new skill. Our minds have no patience for gradual learning and gradual change. Our intellect distinguishes us from other creatures, but the price of the gift seems to be impatience. Other animals operate at the level of instinct and perhaps even of intuition, but our large brains short-circuit the process.
Certainly, we learn fast and adapt with incredible rapidity, which places us neatly at the top of the food chain. It is just a pity that our large brains haven't figured out a way to change rapidly while also honouring the presence of so many other creatures who share with us this slow rotation through space.
Our mind-boggling ability to adapt has its downside, and not just the fact that we are killing off other species at a spectacular rate. We are so smart that we are able to extract carbon from the earth that took millennia to lay down, and pump it into the atmosphere. We are so clever that we are going to fry ourselves, or at least the most vulnerable areas of our planet. Anyone who has watched the focused attention of an animal hunting or even washing must occasionally wonder if our big brains are quite so wonderful as we believe. Not that one would wish to lose self-consciousness, but this ability to not just know, but know that we know, has some unfortunate side-effects.
The ability to separate from our experience means we are quite frequently somewhere else even when we appear to be right here. The Buddhist teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, says that perhaps the greatest gift we can give someone is the gift of our full attention. Well, I guess what is rare is wonderful.
Advent is a time of darkness, but not bleakness. It is the kind of darkness that gives way slowly and gently to the promise of light. We don't do darkness, either. Instead we stagger around, half-dazed from the electric light that allows us to ignore all the rhythms our bodies have evolved to cope with. As you probably know, supermarket lighting is designed to fool us into forgetting that daylight exists, and to keep us trudging up and down the aisles, mechanically filling our baskets with strawberries in December and new potatoes in January.
It is not just the natural seasons and their produce we ignore. Advent fills a human need for rhythm and ritual. Our lives need fasting in order to enjoy feasting. Slow, patient waiting allows our souls to draw breath, allows change to unfold. Darkness can nurture if we do not run away from it. Bring back Advent, I say. Only those damn fools, Roy Wood and Wizzard, wish it could be Christmas every day.