Ysenda Maxtone Graham

In praise of Advent

The ‘little Lent’ is a grown-up season, which mixes fear into the hope

The first Sunday of Advent is 27 November this year. For those of us who prefer Advent services to Christmas ones, the earlier the better, frankly. I relish the frisson of gloom, foreboding and fear of judgment you get at Advent, alongside the hope. ‘The Holly and the Ivy’ is all very well, but it’s the minor chord at the end of ‘O Come, O Come, Emmanuel’ that I crave.

So do thousands of others, it seems. The Advent service at Salisbury Cathedral, for example, is so oversubscribed these days that it’s repeated on three consecutive evenings, starting on the Friday before Advent Sunday. So, tears barely dry from the Remembrance Sunday requiem, you find yourself queuing in the cloisters for an hour and a half on Friday 25 November. The service begins in total darkness and silence. That sets the mood.

More goose-pimples erupt in the naves and transepts of our cathedrals during the Advent service than at any other in the liturgical year. It’s the mixture of bitterness and sweetness that does it, and the extraordinary power of candlelight in darkness. From a single candle lit at the west end of Salisbury Cathedral after that initial pitch-darkness, 1,300 more are lit one by one, as the service progresses. By comparison with all this subtle, dark beauty, the unmitigated jollity of a Christmas carol service can seem rather gaudy and primary-coloured.

French children are taught that Advent is ‘le petit Carême’, ‘little Lent’: a time for sober reflection in preparation for both the birth of Christ and the Second Coming. I like that. Westminster Abbey’s Advent service this year is going to kick off with a plainsong setting of the Dies Irae. That’s the spirit! Give us wrath and gloom.

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