After many years, the text of this Advent hymn still comes to me from memory. I can remember sitting in church as a kid on cold, bright Sunday mornings as the organist intoned the first few notes of it. My eight-year-old brother and I found the invitation, “People, look east!,” to be the strangest thing, and we’d laugh to ourselves as we craned our necks obnoxiously toward the side wall of the church, gloating in our literal and cheerful - albeit sarcastic - interpretation of the hymn. We had no idea what we were looking for. But we were looking.

 

In her novel, Wise Blood, Flannery O’Connor begins the third chapter of the book by describing in great detail the rich texture of the night sky above her main character as he walked along the street of a rural Georgia town:

 

“The black sky was underpinned with long silver streaks that looked like scaffolding and depth on depth behind it were thousands of stars that all seemed to be moving very slowly as if they were about some vast construction work that involved the whole order of the universe and would take all time to complete.”

 

And then, she observes, pointedly:

 

“No one was paying any attention to the sky.”

 

In this season of Advent, as I go through my daily routine of teaching, rounding the building, walking through lunches, and accompanying our students, I can’t help but notice how few of us are looking east. Or looking at the sky. Or even pausing to look at the beautiful (though premature) Christmas decorations festooned around the campus.

 

I do, however, see a lot of staring down at screens.

 

The simple acts of looking east and looking up remind us of our identity as people of Christian hope. In Advent, we look east in anticipation of the star that leads us to the Christ child. We look up in anticipation of the return of Christ. Looking east and looking up remind us that we experience the Kingdom of God among us as “already, but not yet.” We are still a people on the way to something. Waiting is an essential element of our journey, which cannot be swiped away, fast-forwarded, blocked, or replayed. Hope and instant gratification are incompatible.

 

In his treatise On Hope, the German Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper observes that “the way of the ‘man on the way’ is not a directionless back-and-forth between being and nothingness; it leads toward being and away from nothingness; it leads to realization, not annihilation, although this realization is ‘not yet’ fulfilled and the fall into nothingness is ‘not yet’ impossible.”

 

Amidst the anxiety, despair, and darkness of this world, hope is the virtue that strengthens our resolve that we are not destined for nothingness. We are not destined for annihilation. Our lives are not without direction and orientation.

 

As people of Christian hope, we proclaim boldly that our direction is east and our orientation is up.

 

May the hope that comes from God guide our looking accordingly this Advent.