You’ve got me singing “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” and “On Jordan’s Banks the Baptist Cries” again. As you say, there’s a certain austerity and a searching (if not haunting) quality to many of these Advent hymns. This rich tone often feels more suited to the lived tension, from the standpoint of basic eschatology, between what has come and what’s coming. Honestly, I find more joy in these hymns (the two I name and the two you name) than in most Christmas carols, as much as I also love them. Perhaps these Advent songs bring something like the joy you experience listening actively to harmony in conflict.
Your essay also makes me start to realize that preparation is essential to freedom. Preparation is active hope—the last thing an unjust realm wants working in its people.
I’m glad to learn that the practitioners of Haitian Vodou have a term for an active listener. My own passivity—specifically, my uncritical acceptance of Western characterizations of Vodou—stems in part from my culture’s fear of the Other. Only the seeming contradiction of an “active listener” involves us as witnesses, the central concept, I believe, in what Arendt calls “juridical man.” In such a person or persons, the Other gains the potential of becoming something like what Elie Wiesel calls a “helper against,” based on his understanding of Eve’s calling in the Hebrew.
You and Advent are drawing out quite a bit from each other, William. I love it.
Thank you for this. You’ve put your finger on what gives Advent hymns their force: they deepen joy by staying with the ache instead of fleeing it. Their austerity fits the season’s tension between what has begun and what is still coming.
Your point about preparation as active hope is exactly right. Advent resists the passivity unjust orders depend on; it trains us to expect without illusion and to wait without going numb.
And the idea of the active listener pushes against the old habit of treating the “Other” as a problem to solve. Arendt’s “juridical man” and Wiesel’s “helper against” point in the same direction: difference as something that summons us, not something to neutralize.
You’ve got me singing “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” and “On Jordan’s Banks the Baptist Cries” again. As you say, there’s a certain austerity and a searching (if not haunting) quality to many of these Advent hymns. This rich tone often feels more suited to the lived tension, from the standpoint of basic eschatology, between what has come and what’s coming. Honestly, I find more joy in these hymns (the two I name and the two you name) than in most Christmas carols, as much as I also love them. Perhaps these Advent songs bring something like the joy you experience listening actively to harmony in conflict.
Your essay also makes me start to realize that preparation is essential to freedom. Preparation is active hope—the last thing an unjust realm wants working in its people.
I’m glad to learn that the practitioners of Haitian Vodou have a term for an active listener. My own passivity—specifically, my uncritical acceptance of Western characterizations of Vodou—stems in part from my culture’s fear of the Other. Only the seeming contradiction of an “active listener” involves us as witnesses, the central concept, I believe, in what Arendt calls “juridical man.” In such a person or persons, the Other gains the potential of becoming something like what Elie Wiesel calls a “helper against,” based on his understanding of Eve’s calling in the Hebrew.
You and Advent are drawing out quite a bit from each other, William. I love it.
Thank you for this. You’ve put your finger on what gives Advent hymns their force: they deepen joy by staying with the ache instead of fleeing it. Their austerity fits the season’s tension between what has begun and what is still coming.
Your point about preparation as active hope is exactly right. Advent resists the passivity unjust orders depend on; it trains us to expect without illusion and to wait without going numb.
And the idea of the active listener pushes against the old habit of treating the “Other” as a problem to solve. Arendt’s “juridical man” and Wiesel’s “helper against” point in the same direction: difference as something that summons us, not something to neutralize.
You push the conversation forward. Nice!