The Fare Forward Interview with Hannnah Anderson
Hannah Anderson is an author and essayist whose latest work is entitled Heaven and Nature Sing: 25 Advent Reflections to Bring Joy to the World. She lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia with her husband, Nathan, and their three children. Her other books include All That’s Good: Recovering the Lost Art of Discernment and Turning of Days: Lessons from Nature, Season, and Spirit.
Fare Forward: Can you share with our readers your brief personal history with the rhythms of Advent, as well as what led you to write Heaven and Nature Sing?
Hannah Anderson: I grew up understanding Advent as a countdown to Christmas. There was this vague sense of waiting, but our cultural rhythms interpreted these weeks as waiting for the last big celebration of the season rather than the first. Advent was “long Christmas” with December 25 the grand finale.
Our family celebrations did include a couple particularities, however, that prepared me to celebrate Advent more fully. Growing up, our holiday schedule was always just a few weeks delayed because my parents were teachers. We’d wait for school to wrap up before we decorated or began celebrating. This meant that I was accustomed to being on a different timeline than my peers and so shifting celebrations further to the end of the seasonal cycle made sense to me.
I also grew up in a rural area where Advent corresponded with winter solstice. The weeks before Christmas meant a gathering darkness in which it was almost impossible to not feel the gloom descending as days grew shorter and colder. Not everyone lives in such a climate, but for me, this seasonal shift became an access point for a corresponding spiritual shift toward reflection, longing, and lament.
I suppose Heaven and Nature Sing was a way to reconcile these different experiences in my own life while inviting other folks to do the same. Given the shape of modernity, we often lack traditions and practices that root us to previous generations and even to the earth around us. As a result, it can sometimes feel like we’re floating in a state of anti-gravity, not knowing which way is up. I think the rhythms of Advent hold a lot of potential for recovering and reorienting us to what is lasting.
Advent is the ideal space to entertain these questions because it is the time of year devoted to preparing for the Incarnation, when heaven and nature literally meet in the body of Jesus Christ.
FF: Something you emphasize in the book is the fact that we are not alone in our longing for Christ. Nature, too, groans for redemption and Christ’s return. What lessons and encouragements toward hope and fortitude in waiting can we take from the natural world?
HA: Nature has a way of keeping us honest while still offering hope. As humans, we can tell ourselves stories or find coping mechanism to deny the painful realities of life, but creation doesn’t do this. As much as it tells the truth about the hope found in a seed, it also tells the truth about things like hunger, predation, and death.
But for all this, nature is remarkably patient, cycling through predictable rhythms and staying the course. (Of course, we’re seeing some significant shifts in climate, but we wouldn’t even be able to recognize these deviations if a pattern didn’t exist in the first place.) So I see in nature a kind of perseverance that is willing to name the weight of loss while also getting up every day and doing it all over again. I suppose in this sense, nature shows us how to continue in our God-given work while we wait for redemption.
FF: You’ve mentioned that “Joy to The World” is not just a Christmas hymn, but an Advent hymn and really a hymn for the whole of Christian life. Similarly, nature’s participation in longing and celebration is not confined only to the Advent and Christmas seasons. Can you tell us a little bit about what specifically drew you to connect nature/the created order to the celebration of Advent in particular?
HA: Over the last few years, natural elements have taken a more central role in my thinking and writing. My last book was a collection of essays about how seasonal realities hold spiritual ones, and I just didn’t feel done with that conversation. Being in this space creatively, the line “heaven and nature sing” got stuck in my head in a peculiar way, and I began to hear it more literally than Isaac Watts may have intended. I began to wonder what it meant that the earth both waits with longing (as Paul puts it in Romans 8) and that it celebrates the coming of its Creator King.
To me, Advent is the ideal space to entertain these questions because it is the time of year devoted to preparing for the Incarnation, when heaven and nature literally meet in the body of Jesus Christ. Even more interesting is the fact that Paul uses birth imagery to describe the earth’s longing for redemption. So in Advent, we’re really observing the last few weeks of a pregnancy: both Mary’s and the earth’s. It is an inescapably material season focused on both the pain of life coming into existence and the hope that life brings. And I figured that if the earth was already witnessing to this reality, it made sense to foreground its voice throughout the Nativity story—to step aside for a minute and let it lead the conversation.
FF: In the intro to Heaven and Nature Sing, you mention several ways a reader might use your book with the final encouragement that it can also be used “with the best of intentions”—that is, to use it briefly and then allow the book to get set aside during the busyness of the season only to find it later and attempt to catch up. You later say that you’ve “never known [Christmas] to wait” until you were ready for it. This is such a relatable sentiment. I wonder if there are any practices—daily, weekly, etc.—you would most recommend to keep that rushed feeling at bay? It is so easy to get caught up in the imagined ideal of what Advent will look like that I struggle with feelings of disappointment that Christmas is right around the corner—that it’s coming and I can’t stop it from doing so!
HA: In my experience, the best antidote to seasonal perfectionism is failure. Fail long enough and often enough and you’re going to have to make peace with things sooner or later. Of course, this is also a very hard lesson to learn and has the potential to rob us of peace and joy while we’re learning it. So until we do (or as we relearn anew each year), I’ve also adopted a practice of naming my seasonal disappointments—if only to God and myself. This isn’t confessing sin. It’s the work of acknowledging and naming limitations in a cultural moment that tempts us to live beyond them. So I say something like, “God, you know that I really wanted XYZ to happen, and it’s not going to. I’m disappointed, but I also know that there’s a lot of goodness yet to be found. Help me receive that.”
So much of the spiritual work of this season is learning to name our creaturely limits while learning to hope in our limitless God. We might learn this lesson through carefully-crafted habits, routines, and practices. But God’s grace is large enough to teach it to us when our best intentions fall through.
When I’m pressed for a specific habit, however, I tell folks that even during the holidays you still have to eat and sleep. These points of your day can act as anchors in an otherwise chaotic time. The small step of keeping a book of Advent readings or prayers on your kitchen table or beside your bed will increase the chance that you’ll pause for a few moments of reflection and attention. And slowly over time, these repeated moments will change us, shaping and forming us in ways we won’t understand until later.
Advent invites us to name the gap between the ideal and the real, but we can only do that if we know that Christmas is coming.
FF: You’ve written and spoken quite a bit about the Incarnation having taken place in time, and our own individual positions in time. Our place in history is not one of independence, but is the product of the generations before us, and along with their history we also carry their celebrations, their rhythms, their sorrows, their dysfunction—everything good and bad that constituted their lives. Why is this tension so poignant for the Advent and Christmas seasons in particular?
HA: Holidays are inherently generational. We’re ushered into them before we have a chance to agree, and we learn their rhythms by performing and participating in them. As we age, we decide what we want to keep and what we want to pass on, but we can’t escape the fact that we entered a story already in progress.
This idea of entering a story in progress is another theme central to Advent and Christmas. They invite us to rehearse an ongoing story into which a child was born and as such, they embody past, present, and future in a way we don’t usually give attention to. In this sense, Advent and Christmas are deeply time-aware, and I believe they awaken a similar kind of generational awareness in us. Here in these weeks, we’re remembering what we’ve received while deciding what we’ll pass on. We’re grieving loss and brokenness while hoping for better things for the future. And there’s little that says hope for the future like the birth of a child who will save the world.
FF: Many of the pieces in this particular issue are focused on the darkness, deep angst-filled longing, and deferred hope of Advent. Your book has, for the most part, an entirely different tone. How do you reckon with the seemingly disharmonious relationship between waiting in darkness for the Light and hoping that all things will be made whole and new in Christ’s coming again?
HA: In my mind, Heaven and Nature Sing is a bridge for folks who may be new to Advent but who also aren’t entirely able to name their longings and disappointments yet. I’m sensitive to the fact that we live in a deeply anxious age—one that I believe has been brought about by a gap between what we’re told life can offer and what it actually offers. We live at this supposed pinnacle of human achievement that conditions us to trust human progress and possibility. At the same time, our experience of life is deeply unsatisfying and painful. So we have these unmet expectations that we don’t know what do with because we still believe we should be able to attain happiness. And we can’t name our brokenness because there are no answers for it beyond ourselves.
It seems to me that such people need large helpings of grace. We need to know that something outside ourselves is going to save us so that we can acknowledge that we need saving in the first place. We need the kind of hope that makes confession possible. Advent invites us to name the gap between the ideal and the real, but we can only do that if we know that Christmas is coming.
FF: What literary or spiritual sources have shaped your understanding of Advent over the years? Are there passages you return to year after year?
HA: Hymnody has played a significant role in my understanding of Advent, including songs like “Joy to the World,” “O Come, O Come Emmanuel,” “Come Thou Long Expected Jesus,” and Part I, Scenes 1 and 2 of Handel’s Messiah. I’ve also learned a lot about truth telling and uncomfortable hope as a category from Flannery O’Connor; and Fleming Rutledge’s sermons on Advent are quickly becoming required reading.
But it was writers like Annie Dillard and Gerard Manley Hopkins who helped me see this longing through the eyes of nature. To me, Hopkins’s poem “God’s Grandeur” feels like essential Advent: the tension of a world both “charged with the grandeur of God” and “seared . . . bleared, smeared with toil” waiting for the Holy Ghost to make it new each day. I don’t know how you can express hope and longing much better than that.
FF: What do you most hope people learn or take away from Heaven and Nature Sing?
HA: I have two hopes for this book: First that people will receive Advent as an invitation to speak the truth about themselves and their lives because they are safe in the hope Christ offers. I want to grant readers permission to feel the anxiety that accompanies the holidays and understand it as both normal and exactly why we need God to deliver us.
Beyond that, I hope that Heaven and Nature Sing stirs people’s imaginations about scope of redemption and our role in the drama. Too often, we’re trying to take center stage when we’re part of a larger chorus of longing and praise. But singing in that chorus means learning to hear and harmonize with the voices around us, including the voices of the natural world.
More of Hannah’s work can be found at sometimesalight.com.