It’s starting to sound very similar to Christmas. It’s that time of year when people complain that the Christmas music comes too early every year. For some, that could mean complaining about Christmas carols in stores at the end of October. But for a liturgically inclined person like me, Christmas is the time of Christmas music, which shouldn’t actually start until December 24th. Advent – ​​its own season with its own ethos, moods and rites – has its own music. That’s why I always complained that we should wait for “Jingle Bells” and sing “Creator of the Stars of Night.” But over the last few years I’ve listened a little more closely and realized that we don’t have Christmas music early or late. We are a culture with too much Advent music.

Think about it. Few popular Christmas songs are about celebrating Christmas in the present. It’s about the longing for Christmas in the future. “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas.” “It’s starting to look a lot like Christmas.” “Everything I want for Christmas.” Santa makes lists, checks them twice, and comes to town. But he rarely is Here. The most beautiful secular Advent song is Bing Crosby singing “I’ll be home for Christmas”. The song is full of longing for the peculiarities of Christmas: “Please have snow and mistletoe and presents under the tree.” Bing enthuses that “Christmas Eve will find me where the light of love shines.” But ends painfully and beautifully the song asserting that Bing – and the many service members he represents – will be home for Christmas, “if only in my dreams.”

We long for the coming Christmas in words set to music, even if this Christmas is only in our dreams.

But that’s Advent music. Advent is the time of longing. When you pray the Liturgy of the Hours, you pray the words “Come Lord Jesus” dozens of times a week. Think of the great Advent hymn “Veni Emmanuel” (O come, oh come, Emmanuel). We pray in the darkness of December that the Morning Star, the Root of Jesse, the Wisdom of God, would come. Veni, we pray ten times. Essentially we are asking for the coming of Emmanuel, God with us. The season’s music is imbued with a rich sense of the minor key, the sound quality of sadness but also aching longing. We long because we love and because what we love has not yet arrived.

Photo by Naomichi / Adobe Stock.

While much of the popular “Christmas” music lacks the divine direction of our longing hearts, it is nonetheless music of longing. Even though the music is as exuberant as Mariah Carey’s “All I want for Christmas,” it’s still informed by a desire to have a presence that doesn’t yet exist. Advent, translated from written Greek Parousiais the Latin word for “arrival” or “arrival of one expected”. Advent is the time when we long for our love to be present so that we can enjoy it as if we were here with ourselves. Most of what you hear on the radio is just music like that, even if the presence we long for is family, friends, a lover, Santa Claus, or just presents.

Imagine this in contrast to real Christmas music: “Joy to the World,” “In Dulce Jublio,“Hark the Herald Angels Sing,” “Gaudete!“When we sing of the coming, it is about us worshiping him “joyfully and triumphantly.” Why? Because He is there to worship in reality and not just in our dreams. Good Christian men should rejoice. Happy gentlemen should rest in such a way that nothing disturbs them. Even the quieter, darker Christmas songs are joyful. “Silent night, holy night… for your virgin mother and child. Holy child, so tender and gentle, sleep in heavenly peace.” Holding the baby you long for is different than waiting for the baby you long for. Christmas music is filled with joy, with peace in what we have longed for, with the presence of our love and our loved ones. It is this joy that is missing from most popular Christmas music, and when it is present, it is substituted or sentimental. Christmas joy is not sugary sweet. The joy of Christmas music comes from the knowledge that Christ “was born on Christmas Day / to save us all from the power of Satan / when we had gone astray.”

That’s not to say that I don’t like popular Christmas music or longing music. Advent is my favorite liturgical season and every December Bing makes my heart beat faster. To be a Christian is to live longing to see God’s face and be in His presence. Likewise, we spend a large part of our lives in longing and absence. There’s a place for music about how, despite the pain of giving your heart to someone who gave it away, you still hope to give it to someone special next Christmas.

The problem with so much Advent music being disguised as Christmas music is that it leaves us, well, without Christmas music. We are left in a culture of longing without arrival, of longing without joy, a culture that only arrives in its dreams. This is particularly bad for those who do not attend Christmas services and do not hear the joyful music. Advent music, whether secular or religious, is the music of a restless heart. But it should not be a permanent state of unrest; As Augustine says, “O Lord, our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”

We are left in a culture of longing without arrival, of longing without joy, a culture that only arrives in its dreams.

It is this resting in joy that modern life seems to resist. A liturgical Christmas is the wonderfully difficult to enumerate season of eight days (it’s an octave), twelve days (until Epiphany), miscellaneous days (until the Baptism of the Lord), or forty days (until Candlemas). Now, many non-liturgical Christians gather for one day, return gifts the next day, and then get back to work.

We are too close to Thomas Hobbes’ view of humanity, which has so shaped the modern world. For Hobbes, people have “a constant and restless desire for power, for power, which ends only in death.” This power is the ability to get what we want. But fundamentally, the ability to get what we want leads us to desire more. So it is longing without presence, work without rest and completion without satiation. So for Hobbes there is none summum bonum or complete Ultimus. There is endless Advent music, with no Christmas melodies to be heard. Or as CS Lewis puts it The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobeendless winter without Christmas.

Blaise Pascal also observed our restless and endless desire for more in the way we seek distraction and power. For Pascal, however, this infinite desire was a sign that there is an infinite fulfillment, a perfect resting place that alone can satisfy our tormented hearts. Pascal knew what it meant to have only prayer.”veni” and only being at home in his dreams. But he also knew Christmas. On the night of his conversion, he wrote words on a piece of paper, words that he then carried next to his heart for the rest of his life. The focus of the letter was the words “joy, joy, joy.” They could be the words of a Christmas carol. These beatific words are the words of a man who knew Advent and prayed for his presence: “Let me not be separated from him forever.” But Pascal also knew what it meant, “eternally rejoicing in one day’s movement on earth ” to be. In other words: The eternal joy of Christmas is promised to us after, but also in the midst of, the short Advent season of our lives.

While it is true that our current lives are characterized by desires, there can be no real Christmas if secularism dominates our lives. There can only be an Advent without arrival, that is, only striving in desire without resting in joy. Both Pascal and Hobbes knew that a life in this world can only be a place of infinite desires without finite or infinite fulfillment. This is a life where we are only home for Christmas in our dreams.

This vision is real, but to a Christian it is only part of the story. Our life is an Advent season of waiting, working and longing. But we can have the hope of joy and real moments of rest in joy when we believe in Christmas. We dwell in Advent, but we are not destined to do so remain in Advent. Advent is the path from longing into joy. We can also see this in our Advent music. We sing “Gaude,” Rejoice as often as “veni”, Come in”Veni Emmanuel.” We do not make this journey by pretending that there is no longing and darkness. There is a reason we sing Advent songs in the middle of the long night.

We can make this journey from longing to joy if we believe the first carol of Isaiah. To sing one’s hymn is to know the possibility of real Christmas music – whether it is sung in church or while swinging around a Christmas tree or sailing among the apple trees. Written with longing, Isaiah’s carol expresses the joyful reality of God’s presence eight hundred years before the birth of Emmanuel. His anthem has nothing of the uncertainty that Bing is at home in his dreams. Instead, Isaiah had the Advent certainty of Christmas joy. The joy that knows, even in the darkness of December: “For us, a child Is born to us a son Is given.”