Exams, Trouble, and the Mystery of Advent

Exam season has already begun here at KPU as we make our way through Advent. Walking down the now quiet halls of the university, free from the busyness of regular classes, I glance through classroom doors at rooms full of students hunched over the set of questions or problems their professor has prepared for them. Exams are not enjoyable. The stress of cramming an enormous amount of information into your head coupled with the uncertainty of what is actually going to be on the exam does not make for a peaceful transition into the Advent and then Christmas seasons.

I’ve been a student my whole conscious life. For the past eight years I have been either in university or grad school, and every December brings the same mix of excitement and dread. I love Advent, it’s my favorite season of the Church year. The haunting Advent hymns of waiting and longing, both for the mystery of the Incarnation of God in Jesus of Nazareth and for the second coming, where all things will be brought to completion in Christ, inspire in me a curious mix of giddiness and peace. There is nothing quite like plugging in some indoor Christmas lights on a chilly December evening and listening to Loreena McKennitt’s “Snow” in that gentle, dull light. Utter peace in midst of the thrilling adventure of waiting for God.

But, alas, I so rarely get to enjoy that experience without the throb of anxiety in my chest over the sheer volume of school work that accompanies the end of the semester. It’s simply the burden of the pattern and timing of our education system, aligned to place on students the most burdens when the church calendar calls for the most quiet reflection.

However, there are of course moments in every day, in every hour, where the mystery of God among us calls us out of our frantic pace, whether we are a student or not. It seems like a luxury to even have the opportunity to reflect on this mystery when so many people both around the world and locally are struggling to make sense of their own lives, or maybe have even given up on that task all together. (Just this afternoon I was listening to Bob Marley, that quintessential summer musician, who spells it out plainly in a chorus: “so much trouble in the world”).

But, in fact, it is in the midst of that trouble that the mystery of the incarnation calls us to contemplate and reflect. In a world held captive by sin and suffering, whether for the university student or for the countless other troubles that burden humanity, God has mysteriously, beautifully, come to us proclaiming salvation.

So peace and rest in the Advent season might initially seem like a misuse of time in exam season. Or it might seems like a luxury we should forgo when so much suffering in the world calls for action (or at least guilt), not contemplation. But contemplation is an action, a “non-act act,” by which we connect ourselves with the source and fountain of all true love and hospitality: the transcendent, immanent, beautiful, and mysterious triune God. There is deep trouble in the world; but deeper still is infinite beauty.