Advent Week 1: We hunger. We hope. We wait.
Entering Advent Through Story, Suffering, and the God Who Comes in the Dark
Advent Begins Today
In many Christian traditions, including my own (Presbyterian), Advent unfolds through four movements across four weeks: Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love. We are meant to anchor in attention, longing, holy expectation, and arrive in Love when Christ enters the world.
It’s never been about counting down to Christmas. Advent is older, quieter, stranger, and far more demanding than that. We hunger. We hope. We wait in the dark for light that is not yet here.
Hope sometimes feels like insanity.
Why should I hope for the light when the world is full of suffering? Why believe in justice when the world is cruel and harsh? Why hope at all when we are suspended between birth and death — held in the tension of mortality? Follow that thought long enough and you hit nihilism — the pure absence of meaning — the darkest possibility in human experience.
Distressing, yes, but here is the astonishing part: every deep story humanity has ever told refuses nihilism. Meaning is always revealed through suffering, never around it. This is not abstract hope. It is woven as story into the tapestry of our world by what C. S. Lewis called “The Great Mind.”
Every culture tells a variation of this story:
Break, rupture, exile →
Descent, wandering, death-like state →
Encounter, meaning arrives in the dark →
Integration, reorganization →
Emergence, return, Resurrection.
It is the architecture of Scripture — Collapse, Rescue, Exile, Integration, Homecoming.
It is the Exodus Pattern — Leaving Egypt (leaving what enslaves you), entering the wilderness (disorientation of trauma), receiving manna (unexpected nourishment/grace), Sinai (receiving revelation, insight), and arriving to the Promised Land (integration, restoration).
It is the psychological model of trauma recovery — shattering via a trigger event, loss of safety, identity rupture, hyper-vigilance; then dissolution, disorientation, emotional collapse; then nervous system recalibration, somatic release, emotional processing, and meaning-making; and finally emerging clarity, stability, integration.
It is the mythical pattern of transformation: Persephone and Orpheus descending into the underworld; being dismembered and tortured, or held captive; receiving insight; returning changed, then changing the world.
It is a phoenix burned to ash, and in the smoldering embers, reborn.
It is Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey. The hero is called, refuses, then crosses the threshold where they are tested, sunk into the abyss, but then finds revelation and returns changed.
It is the natural world, where summer turns to fall, which gives way to the dormancy of winter and its quiet regeneration. Spring awaits with new life — but first, we must survive the cold dark.
This pattern is not decorative. It is hope manifested — in the world, in the body, in the soul.
Simone Weil and the Use of Suffering
This is where Simone Weil, my favorite philosopher of affliction, helps us. In Gravity and Grace, she writes:
“The extreme greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural remedy for suffering, but a supernatural use for it.” (p. 132)
What is that use?
It is this: when we reach the end of our strength, when the illusion of control is wrestled from our hands, that is the moment God can finally enter. Not to erase suffering, but to transform it.
Leonard Cohen echoes it: “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”
It is through the pattern etched above that we are reborn. If this seems unlikely, Weil answers that concern as well:
“Impossibility is the door of the supernatural. We can but knock at it. It is someone else who opens it.” (p. 148)
This is defiant hope. Hope that scoffs at impossibility. Hope that insists God incarnated in the world, was crucified, and resurrected — and in doing so, showed us the way through darkness.
“In him was life, and that life was the light of all humankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”— John 1:1–5
This is the hope of Advent: light returning — not because we deny the dark, but because God inhabits it.
In the darkness, we knock.
And we wait.
Theologically, Advent sits on three time horizons at once:
The Past: Israel’s long wait for the Messiah — the ache for justice, the longing for God to act.
The Present: Christ coming to us now — in our lives, our relationships, our weariness, our hope. Not metaphorically, but truly. The Incarnation repeats itself in every honest moment where we open ourselves to grace.
The Future: The promise that everything broken will be mended, that the world will be set right, that Love will have the final word. Advent holds all three at once like a braid — past promise, current presence, future fulfillment.
It’s a season of attention, not activity.Receptivity, not performance.Honest longing, not forced cheer. That’s why Simone Weil belongs here.
Simone Weil: The Philosopher Who Waited for God
Simone Weil — philosopher, mystic, survivor of affliction — found me in a Barnes & Noble in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1997. I’d just been excommunicated from the Mormon Church — hello exile. I was lost and disoriented — hello desert. I still don’t know how I found her book, tucked away in the far corner of the store, the light dim. Why did I reach for it? I have no idea — hello unexpected revelation. (Perhaps, she reached for me.)
I bought only the Simone Weil Reader. I devoured it that night, understood little, but her words nestled inside me and seeded just enough defiant hope. I’ve revisited her many times since — always in desert seasons. Each time, I take away deeper understanding.
In Waiting for God, she writes that real prayer isn’t the words we say but the attention we give. For Weil, attention is the soul’s posture of readiness — a radical openness where we stop grasping, stop demanding, stop filling every silence, and instead make interior space for God to enter. It’s not passive. It’s not resignation. Attention is the fiercest form of love.
Advent, through Weil’s eyes, becomes a season where we practice attentive waiting rather than anxious striving — presence instead of distraction. She teaches that real transformation doesn’t happen because we achieve something, but because we become available.
2025 Can Leave Already
Every year carries its own emotional weather. This one — if you’re anything like me — has been marked by upheaval, transition, grief, and rebuilding. Advent meets us right there: not at the finish line, not at the triumphant moment, but in the halfway place between ruin and renewal.
The season says: You don’t have to be done healing for God to arrive. You don’t have to be perfect to pay attention. You don’t have to rush your story —the light is coming, and the light knows where to find you.
This year, I’m reading Weil during Advent because she keeps me honest. She brings faith out of abstraction and sets it back in the body.
I’ll be sharing reflections each week — a blend of Scripture, mysticism, Simone Weil, and the everyday spirituality of trying to stay awake in my own life.
If your year has been loud, Advent is a doorway. If your heart feels tired, Advent is a resting place. If you’re longing for light but can’t quite see it yet, Advent whispers: Just wait. Light knows how to return.
“The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness — on them light has shined.”— Isaiah 9:2