When I was a child, Advent meant one thing: the Advent calendar.
In our house it was usually cardboard, glittery, and filled with small chocolates. Each morning, I would prise open a window with eager fingers and enjoy the tiny treasure inside.
It was delightful, of course, but it never occurred to me that Advent had anything to do with the Christian story, let alone with a deep tradition stretching back centuries.
For me, Advent was simply part of the countdown to Christmas, a sweet daily ritual on the way to the main event.
It was not until my late teens that I stumbled upon the Advent tradition in its full richness.It struck me immediately how shallow my childhood ‘‘Advent’’ experience had been by comparison — not wrong, just thin.
The difference was like stepping from a brightly lit shopping mall into the quiet of a church. One sparkled for a moment; the other held space for something weightier, more beautiful, and more fully human.
The Advent calendars of my childhood, and of our supermarkets today, offer a predictable daily pleasure. By contrast, the traditional season of Advent begins with Isaiah, John the Baptist, and Jesus’ unsettling warnings that the world is not as it should be. It starts with lament, longing, and the courage to look unflinchingly at what is broken around us and within us.
That was my first shock as a young adult discovering Advent: its refusal to pretend. It insists on honesty.
It meets us in the messy places we would rather gloss over — violence, injustice, anxiety, the weight of our own failures. It gives us a language for naming the darkness rather than avoiding it.
It also slows things down. It asks us to wait — not passively, but attentively. To prepare. To listen. To leave room for God’s future to shape us.
In my young adulthood, when life felt rushed and crowded, this was a revelation.
The discipline of waiting — so foreign to the culture of instant delivery and gratification — felt strangely liberating. Advent taught me that some gifts cannot be rushed: healing, reconciliation, justice, peace. And that some hopes must be tended slowly, like embers.
As a child, each door in the calendar was self-contained. A treat today, another tomorrow. No story, no thread, no sense of movement.
The Advent I encountered as an adult, however, told a sweeping narrative: the longing of ancient Israel, the promise of Emmanuel, the audacity of Mary’s song, the world-transforming hope carried in the womb of a young Middle Eastern woman.
It was a story that connected my tiny, modern anxieties to a much larger horizon.
And in a time when many feel disoriented — politically, economically, environmentally — that bigger story feels urgently necessary.
A story in which despair does not get the final word. A story in which light shines, even if the darkness has not yet lifted.
The calendars of my childhood gave small pleasures. Advent gave me something much stronger: hope with backbone.
When Isaiah speaks of a shoot growing out of a dead stump, he is naming a deep hope — life emerging from devastation, not bypassing it.
When Mary sings that the mighty will be brought down and the humble lifted up, she proclaims a hope that confronts rather than comforts the status quo.
Compared with that, the commercial Advent calendar feels almost comically flimsy. It offers distraction when what we actually need is formation.
Recovering the depth of Advent doesn’t require discarding all the light-hearted rituals I once loved.
But it does ask something more of us — especially in a season saturated with noise and hurry.
It begins with pausing. Lighting a candle perhaps, sitting in silence for a few moments, reading a passage of scripture, saying a prayer, making space for reflection.
It continues with turning outward. Supporting a foodbank or Christmas appeal.
Checking in on someone who is grieving. Forgiving a long-held hurt. In scripture, the coming of Christ and the coming of justice always belong together.
And it culminates in rediscovering wonder — not the kind manufactured in shops, but the wonder that emerges when we let ourselves believe that healing is possible, that renewal is under way, that God is still at work in unexpected places.
The Advent calendar of my childhood gave me chocolates. The Advent I later discovered taught me to value courage, hope, and honesty.
In a world frayed by conflict, pressure, and fatigue, the deep waiting of Advent is not a luxury.
It is the medicine our moment requires — an invitation to slow down, tell the truth, wait with intention, and dream again of a world made new.
That, surely, is a door worth opening.
• Graham Redding is the Douglas Goodfellow lecturer in chaplaincy studies at the University of Otago.
