Advent Stillness in the Eye of the Hurricane

Picture: St John’s Church, Little Gidding

Advent begins with a strange invitation. It’s an invitation not to hurry, to pause, to savor the stillness of the moment at the point where time feels different – where the past and future seem to lean in on us at the same moment.

We have the prevailing idea that time flows in a linear, one-way direction – from the past into the future. This idea of time normally serves us well in everyday functioning, yet it’s nothing more than a convention of thought that enables us to organize our lives.

At points of crisis, however, we often find ourselves in moments of stillness akin to the eye of a hurricane. Here we have an uncanny sense of timelessness – not of the unidirectional linear flow of time, but of something more akin to convergence. We sense the past and future converging into the stillness of the present moment.

On a bleak, grey, winter’s afternoon, the poet T.S. Eliot arrived in the out-of-the-way hamlet of Little Gidding, deep in rural Huntingdonshire, northwest of Cambridge. That quiet visit became the seedbed for the fourth and final section of his Four Quartets, which he completed as London burned under the steady rain of German bombs.

The village of Little Gidding resonates in the English High Church imagination. In 1625, after the loss of much of their fortune with the collapse of the Virginia Company, the Ferrar family retreated to their estate at Little Gidding. In 1626, Nicholas Ferrar was ordained deacon by Archbishop Laud. As Archbishop of Canterbury, Laud led the extrajudicial suppression of the Puritans, and it was only by the skin of his teeth that one Roger Williams managed to embark for Massachusetts with Laud’s commissioners hot on his heels.

On Monday, we will commemorate Nicholas Ferrar. Under his leadership, the extended family forged a brave experiment in spiritual community centered on the disciplined life of prayer, work, and pastoral care grounded in the Daily Offices of the Book of Common Prayer.

Although Nicholas died in 1637, the community continued under the leadership of his brother, John, and their sister, Susana Collet, until their deaths in 1657.  

King Charles 1^st visited the community three times. The king made his final visit to the community where he sought refuge following the defeat of the Royalist Army by the Parliamentary forces at the Battle of Naseby in 1645.

Chilled to the bone by that miserable dampness that is the unique characteristic of the English winter, after his long and taxing wartime journey from London, Eliot, stood in the little church dedicated to St John the Evangelist, and sensed a timeless moment.  Eliot opened the second stanza of his final quartet, aptly named Little Gidding, capturing his memory of that moment when wave met wave, past touched present, and present opened towards the future. He wrote:

If you came this way, taking any route, starting from anywhere, at any time or in any season, it would always be the same: you would have to put off sense and notion. You are not here to verify, instruct yourself, or inform curiosity or carry report. You are here to kneel where prayer has been valid – here, the intersection of the timeless moment is England and nowhere. Never and always.

Eliot here is speaking of the experience of a moment in timelessness – when the past and future converge in the real-time of the present moment.

Timelessness, interrupting the linear flow of predictability – past touching future in the present, is precisely the spiritual landscape to be explored in Advent.

Advent is where time bends to flow back on itself —
where memory and imagination meet,
where under the influence of the future, the past unsettles the present,
and God’s future leans toward us with urgency.

The voice of the prophet Isaiah conveys a sense of this divine urgency leaning into temporal time. In a vision of a future where swords will be beaten into plowshares, spears into pruning hooks, and where nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.

Isaiah is not describing a dream to admire. He is describing a future that demands our present-time participation!

He beckons us with: “Come, let us walk in the light of the Lord.”

He does not say, let’s wait while we dream of a future better than the present. He commands us to walk now, conveying the divine urgency, leaning in to transform the future dream into something already shaping us in the present.

And here we are in 2025, a year when Isaiah’s vision feels both desperately needed and painfully elusive.

Wars continue to erupt and smolder. Political rhetoric grows sharper, more fearful, more chaotic. We face unprecedented technological acceleration with insufficient moral wisdom and the lack of a protective legislative and legal framework. We feel the low hum of climate anxiety amidst the quiet ache of rising social isolation and loneliness.

In such a world, Isaiah’s invitation is no abstraction. It’s invitation and instruction – it’s hope with boots on.

Come, let us walk in the light of the Lord.

Walk now before the world feels ready – before we have our act together – before we see the way ahead clearly enough to wrest its direction from God’s control.

Advent is a season of preparation. Yet, this is paradoxical. Jesus reminds us that there is nothing we can do to prepare ourselves to be ready. He invites us to simply remain awake, for we cannot know on what day the Lord is coming.

We wake up and stay awake, aware of the dangers of hardening our hearts against hope and allowing despair to shrink our imagination.

To be awake is to be alert to God’s urgency, leaning into the present time – in the moment we live in between Jesus’ birth and his return as the cosmic Christ in end-of-time glory. Here, past and future enfold in real-time punctuated repeatedly by acts of mercy and moments of courage, as the steady persistence of love is realized in the small actions of everyday life.

Traveling back to a drab and battered London, Eliot had felt the echo of Nicholas Farrar’s brave spiritual experiment. For him, the past leaned forward as the future leaned back. Right there, in that moment, something timeless broke through.

He wrote:

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.

This is what it feels like when God’s future leans in upon the present and makes the ordinary shimmer with possibility.

At St. Martin’s, we catch glimpses of what it means to walk in hope before we fully see the way ahead. We are learning — slowly, steadily, faithfully — that hope is made real through service rooted in worship and prayer. Hope is something we make real, together.

We know what it is to rebuild community, deepening in worship and the renewal of ministries; to welcome newcomers with warmth, and to carry the flame of faith forward even when cultural winds blow cold.

Here, week after week, between font and altar, we open to the experience of that still place where the richness of tradition reconfigures to meet the challenges of the future. As we listen for God’s whisper we embrace hope as the antidote to the poison of despair.

Because even now, even here, in this community, with these people, in this moment, God’s dream, long promised, is already leaning in to take shape in us!