Advent Happens

Every year, as the days grow shorter and the pace of life seems to quicken, the Church turns its attention to Advent—a season often mistaken for simply “getting ready for Christmas.” But Advent is far more than preparation. It is a holy invitation to pause, to breathe, and to attend to the God who comes to us. The word itself—Adventus—means “arrival.” It points not to our movement toward God, but to God’s movement toward us.

This distinction is at the heart of Jürgen Moltmann’s theology of Adventus and Futurum. Moltmann, one of the great theologians of hope, reminds us that there are two very different ways of imagining the future. Futurum is the future we create through our plans, our striving, our effort—what results from the natural unfolding of what already is. It’s the kind of future we are tempted to obsess over this time of year: fixing, improving, organizing, achieving, making everything just right. It is a future built on our momentum.

But Adventus is something else entirely. Adventus is the future that arrives from the outside—from God. It comes as holy disruption, as surprise, as grace, as gift. It does not emerge from what we already have; it breaks in from beyond what we could imagine. For Moltmann, Adventus is the true Christian hope: the conviction that God is not waiting for us to build the world God desires. God is already on the move, already drawing near, already arriving in our midst.

This is what the season of Advent proclaims: the world is not saved by our striving but by God’s coming.

And so Advent gently calls us to resist the anxious, hurried logic of Futurum. The hectic schedule, the year-end pressures, the cultural whirl of shopping and noise—these tempt us to think that the meaning of the season depends on our effort. But Advent says the opposite. Advent invites us into quiet expectations, holy longing, and attentive waiting. Not passive waiting, but a hopeful openness to the One who comes.

In Jesus Christ, God arrives—first in a manger, in our struggles and joys, and one day in fullness. Advent teaches us to look back with gratitude, to live now with awareness, and to look forward with hope. Not the hope that we will make the future turn out, but the hope that God will.

This season, may we resist the temptation to think Advent is something we must “pull off.” Instead, let’s allow Advent to shape us into people who notice the quiet ways God is already arriving: in compassion, in shared meals, in acts of kindness, in the faces of friends and strangers, in the deep stillness of prayer.

Christian hope is not built on what we can predict or produce. It is built on the God who surprises us. The God who arrives. The God whose future interrupts our present with joy and consolation.

May this Advent season be, for all of us, a time not of striving, but of receiving—of watching and waiting for the Adventus of God in Jesus Christ.