Among the traditional counsels of this season, the theme of waiting plays a prominent role. We look for the birth of the Messiah and for his second coming with prayerful expectation and pregnant hope.  

The value of a spirituality of waiting can hardly be overstated in a culture which has lost the habit of patience and demands the instant fulfilment of every wish. The gap between desire and fulfilment is eroded by social media, the internet, the omni-availability of consumer goods. The average time we spend on a single page when browsing the net, an activity which occupies an increasing proportion of our lives, is seven seconds. A culture with an attention span of seven seconds is not one that is going to find Advent very accessible.  

In the midst of non-stop entertainment and endless possibilities of satiation, we are bored, listless, disappointed with everything. I heard someone say recently that it is not pain that is the greatest burden of human life, but boredom. The opposite of depression, he said, is not “happiness”, but vitality: a sense of life’s richness, a sense of energy and aliveness. We fight boredom with more activity, more distraction, which, though fretful, is better than the alternative: sitting silently and alone, as Pascal expressed it.