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Advent: Waiting in the Holy Absence
Advent arrives each year with a strange, aching quiet. It invites us into a season of waiting. We wait for Christ’s coming and we wait within the felt absence of God. This is a kind of waiting the Church does not always name, though Scripture knows it well: “How long, O Lord?” In the Anglican and Episcopal traditions, Advent’s hymns, deep blues and purples, and spacious liturgies echo this unsatisfied longing. Before the manger, there were centuries of silence; before the incarnation, there was yearning.
This longing resonates with apophatic theology, the “negative” or via negativa tradition. Instead of defining God by what we can clearly grasp, the apophatic way confesses that God surpasses all comprehension. It is a way of faith shaped by mystery and hunger. Anglican spirituality, especially in its contemplative currents, has long held room for this mystery. Advent invites worshipers not to rush toward resolution but to rest in the holy dimness before dawn.
My favorite modern Christian writer who embodies this tension is the Welsh Anglican priest-poet R. S. Thomas (1913–2000). A parish minister in rural Wales and one of the most revered poets of the 20th century, Thomas wrote with uncompromising honesty about the elusiveness of God. His faith was not tidy; it was sharpened by silence, distance, and yearning.
His poem “Via Negativa” captures the spiritual atmosphere at the heart of Advent:
Why no! I never thought other than
That God is that great absence
In our lives, the empty silence
Within, the place where we go
Seeking, not in hope to
Arrive or find. He keeps the interstices
In our knowledge, the darkness
Between stars. His are the echoes
We follow, the footprints he has just
Left. We put our hands in
His side hoping to find
It warm. We look at people
And places as though he had looked
At them, too; but miss the reflection.1
This is not unbelief, but the shimmering trace of a hidden God, the God who slips just out of view, yet leaves “echoes we follow.” Advent calls us to such following. It teaches us to search for Christ not in the obvious or spectacular, but in the quiet interstices of our days: in the pause between tasks, the ache of longing, the unanswered prayer.
1 Thomas, R. S. “Via Negativa.” Collected Poems: 1945-1990. London: Orion Publishing Group, 1993. p. 220.
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