Dear Readers, 

I remember vividly the first time I heard about the season of Advent. I was sitting in a great books class during spring of my freshman year at college, when apropos of none of the texts, my energetic professor launched into a tangent about the Christian liturgical year. It was a Baptist college, and I think he’d become frustrated with the class’s very Baptist answers to all his inquiries about Aristotle, Virgil, and Augustine. He marched around the seminar table describing the small Episcopal church he’d grown up attending in the woods of North Carolina, and as he marched he painted images for us of dark churches lit only by candlelight, whole hosts of women convening at church on Christmas Eve—no earlier—to hang greenery around the nave, and a period of intentional waiting in darkness. 

The thought of waiting in darkness struck me as both strange—given that Christians celebrate the fact that the Light has come—and also alluring. About a year later I found myself attending an Anglican church and experiencing the season for the first time, enraptured by the way the candles in the church’s wreath brought greater and greater light to the congregation week by week. To this day, though, I have to confess that I still find the waiting a bit strange. It’s an adopted posture that doesn’t quite match any other waiting we do in life. We wait during Advent, sure, but we also know who we’re waiting for, and what he has accomplished for us. 

This mid-month issue of Fare Forward explores the depth of the Advent season, and the writers tackle the above tensions well—sometimes with brutal honesty. In “Peace and Plowshares,” Fr. Jeff Locke contemplates a world without violence, imagining the posture of a people without weaponry. Maria Copeland considers dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction in light of their lessons about hope and darkness. Raquel Sequeira discusses scientific inquiry into the nature of light, wondering ultimately whether the search for truth is foolish. We’re also delighted to feature an Advent poem from Jolene Nolte.

Even while I wrestle every year with the sense that my waiting is “put on” and struggle to slow down during the four week journey through darkness—to turn myself toward prayer and preparation—I have to confess that I love this season dearly. 

I love it because it encapsulates the whole of Christian life. Horrors and violence flash before our eyes in daily news. Sin of all kinds crouches at the door, eager to control us. Darkness, all of it. In Housekeeping (a spectacular novel for Advent), Marilynne Robinson writes that “the force behind the movement of time is a mourning that will not be comforted.” On the same page she comments that the story of Cain and Abel is “A story so sad even God took notice of it. Maybe it was not the sadness of the story, since worse things have happened every minute since that day, but its novelty He found striking.” These sentences hum in the background of my brain as I move throughout this season. I hope the pieces in this issue give you an opportunity to pause in the depth of darkness, but that they also encourage you to hope that the world one day will be made whole.

Fare Forward, 

Moriah Hawkins

Managing Editor