When I was a freshman in college, I was overwhelmingly homesick. I’d moved across the country with barely a backwards glance only to find, a few weeks into my first semester, that I wanted to be nowhere more than back home in Denver with my close-knit family and community. I struggled through the fall, lonely, anxious, counting down the days until I could fly home. As midterms approached, I strung twinkle lights in my dorm room and played familiar Christmas songs as I studied, telling myself I just needed to get through these last few weeks before I would be back with people who loved me.
The music kept me connected to my sweetest childhood memories of the Christmas season — the caramel rolls my mother made each year and delivered to our neighbors; the wooden nutcrackers my sisters and I would take from the mantle to play with our dolls; the bracing scent of the Colorado blue spruce we’d pick out for our Christmas tree. Drenched in these memories, I would tell myself: You only have to wait a little longer. You’re almost home.
One of my favorite songs that year was John Gorka’s hauntingly beautiful rendition of “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.” The song is based on a poem written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow on Christmas Day in 1863. The nation was in the midst of the hellish Civil War and Longfellow’s son Charley, a Union soldier, had been seriously injured in battle. Longfellow gives full voice to the anguish he felt in that season:
And in despair I bowed my head;
“There is no peace on earth,” I said;
“For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!”
And yet, even as Longfellow reflects on a broken country mired in a conflict that will ultimately claim the lives of some 700,000 men, he does not give up hope. He acknowledges the unending pain the nation feels, as though the “hearthstones of the continent” have been rent apart — pain that has touched his own family, pain that seems to mock the very idea of celebrating Christmas Day — but he does not give it the last word. He knows that something better is coming.
Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
“God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men.”
This is Advent: We wait in hope. We wait, amidst our small pains like homesickness and loneliness and our massive griefs like illness, poverty, hunger, war and death — and we trust that God is coming. We wait, as St. Paul puts it, in “eager expectation … in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.” Advent reminds us that God has come — that he broke into our history and entered into our sin and despair to restore us to him — and it reminds us that he will come again — the old order of things will pass away (Rev. 21:4). The wrong shall fail and the right prevail: I pray that you will be buoyed by this hope as we wait with expectation.
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