These reflections will follow the traditional outline of the four weeks of Advent, with their emphases on hope, peace, joy, and love. We’ll cover hope today, asking whether the hopelessness endemic to our situation is at least partially a product of bad theology (unsurprisingly, I think it is).
We live in an age (and, certainly, despite outward appearances, a country) which is impoverished beyond belief in many respects, but first and foremost we are a hopeless and futureless society. To the extent we express hope, it is in princes, and only that they would materially benefit us at the expense of our neighbor, be they elderly, unborn, or any other synonym for “inconvenient reminder of our interdependence”. We are at least honest about the zero-sum nature of our desires, and the paucity of our imagination, but honest viciousness is hardly to be counted to us as virtue.
There is an oft-repeated line from C.S. Lewis that says something along the lines that “our desires are too small”. We are content with something very meager when we ought to be striving and asking God for something great. I think this is quite obviously true (and not, of course, entirely original to Lewis), but I think its repetition has caused it to lose some substance, and to take on a much shallower meaning than our situation demands. It is not simply that we desire too little, but our hearts are heading in the right direction overall. Rather, we desire not only the worse thing, but the wrong thing. We are not satisfied with “too little good”, we are ravenously hungry for wickedness.
“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick. Who can understand it?” asks the prophet1. Christ himself tells us that from the heart comes all that defiles a person2, a verse which, on the rare occasion we consider it, your average Christian thinks of primarily as permission to eat bacon. In short, it is not primarily “The Culture”, an ambiguous antagonistic Other with which we grapple, but with our own desires.
For Renee Girard, desire is mimetic and triangular. That is, we learn what to desire by watching another desire it. This is, in my opinion, nearly impossible to challenge, at least as an analysis of contemporary culture. This is the mechanism by which our social and economic organization run, with its influencer brand deals, Stan cultures, and celebrity endorsements. We do not know, of ourselves, what to desire, and so we look for someone to tell us.
I don’t think, incidentally, that these two insights: that we are concupiscent, desiring what we ought not, due to a corruption in our own hearts, and that our desires are learned, are incompatible. For Girard, who is Catholic, our desires are simply anti-Christic, We desire wrongly because we desire first and seek out wrong teachers, as a consequence of original sin. We imagine a rivalrous relationship with God because that is what our teacher has, going back to the Garden.
Now, whether or not one finds that compelling, it is hardly a purely religious insight to say that our imaginations are impoverished, our games are zero-sum, and our instincts are vicious. One need not be a committed Augustinian to hold a fairly pessimistic view of human nature3.
In any case, I’m here to talk about hope, and what it might mean in the season of Advent. I think that one of the reasons we are hopeless, on a societal level, why we do not bother to imagine a salvation more compelling than “in Heaven I will be myself sans bad behavior”, is that we do not have an honest understanding of the situation we are in. We imagine that things are mostly ok, never realizing how desperately we need an intervention. We are comfortable enough, institutionalized.
The Incarnation, then, represents two dramatic changes for humanity. The first is that Christ, while he is not the first to recognize the reality of the human situation (he follows the Law and the Prophets in this regard), and to be genuinely4 dissatisfied with it, he is the foremost, and the clearest in explicating it. He is the one who diagnoses that it is not merely our positive actions, but even our desires which corrupt. He tells us that, contrary to the “rules of the game” there is no substantial spiritual difference between hating our neighbor, desiring their harm, and the act of murdering them. To cultivate the former is to be guilty of the latter, regardless of whether we’re able to pull it off.
Secondly, having diagnosed the disease, and locating its origin in our hearts, He proposes the cure by His way of life: surrendering to His Father’s will, “taking the form of a slave5”, being, according to McCabe, “so human they killed Him6”. So, converse to the diagnosis of our desire, we are told that when we do that which is foolish to the world: giving with no expectation of being paid back, showing mercy to the “undeserving” (as though any of us are “deserving”), and generally learning to live as Christ lived and desire what He desires, these acts are “pure and undefiled religion7”, religion being the virtue of justice rendered unto God. To chop an egregiously long sentence down as Christ did: what we do to the poor we do to Him, and what we desire for the outcast we desire for Him. This should inspire awe and gratitude (what a gift, to have so many infant Christs to adore!) and terror (what a great multitude of Christs we have all mocked and abused!)
Advent is, traditionally, a penitential season of the Church, one in which, like Lent, we reflect on our own situation, that we may celebrate our salvation in full understanding, with rent hearts. As we wait for “the desire of the everlasting hills8”, for whom “creation groans9” in anticipation, it is appropriate to examine our own desires, not simply in the bog-standard “don’t forget the reason for the season” way (though not neglecting that), but in the knowledge that He comes to save, and that we desperately need His salvation. As with its more famous fellow-penitential season, it is also a time we are obliged to give alms, and as we are (so far as I can tell) looking at another brutally cold winter, I ask and encourage you to look into how best you can contribute to housing and feeding your neighbors, the images of Christ, who would otherwise go without. I apologize for springing an ask on you, but it felt inappropriate to exclude here.
May God bless and keep all of you, know of my prayers.
Jeremiah 17:9
Matthew 15:18-20
Though it helps!
And, of course, sinlessly. Many of us are perfectly good at sinful dissatisfaction
Philippians 2:7
“Good Friday”
James 1:27
Genesis 49:26
Romans 8:22