How Advent Teaches Us, Amid Sorrow, To Rejoice

“Why are these Christmas songs so sad?”

The question came from a little girl named Hazel. She’d been raised in a different Christian tradition, with drums, guitars, and applause. But that Sunday of Advent, she was sitting with her dad in a small Catholic church among the California redwoods outside Santa Cruz.

O come, o come, Emanuel,
And ransom captive Israel.

“I think they’re beautiful,” he whispered.

I chuckled when he told me what she’d asked. I’d never thought of it that way. Church at Advent was peaceful, yes — a quiet and contemplative place, where the noble smell of incense took the place of Christmas trees, the flicker of Advent candles replaced the blinking lights of shops and lampposts, and we sang of the Holy Family rather than Rudolph, Santa, and Frosty.

But there is a sadness in Advent that better educated Christians than I understood long before they heard the simple question Hazel asked her father. More than sadness, there is a longing so deep that for centuries in the Middle Ages, priests wore black in its presence, and still today wear purple as a sign of both their mourning for what is to come, and the royal nature of our deliverer.