Advent has always been my favourite season of the year. The weeks leading up to Christmas are the only time I actually enjoyed the snow and subzero temperatures of my native Winnipeg. I always liked the soft silence of my footsteps on newly fallen snow; I liked the warm glow coming from the windows of my home church as I made my way to choir practice. I liked how, as the choir learned new music for Advent and Christmas services, the meaning of strange words in French, Latin, Russian, would slowly filter into my brain over the course of endless repetitions as we worked towards getting the pieces (just about) right.
I also like Advent because it’s the most apocalyptic, revolutionary season of the church year—the time when we look forward to the promise of a completely different world. This aspect of Advent is most obvious whenever we get to sing the Magnificat, the song Mary sings at the annunciation, celebrating a God that has “has cast down the mighty from their thrones and lifted up the lowly,” has “filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.” I love the beauty and force of this song. But this year I’ve been thinking about some of the other parts of the Advent lectionary, and about what it means to wait for the arrival of “peace on earth.”
This year, I moved to Mexico from Haiti to take on a new job, a job where I spend a lot of time reading and analysis of the historical and political context of MCC’s work in Latin America. Quite a bit has happened in Latin America since I started in June. While 2018 saw significant protests in Haiti, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, in the latter half of 2019, protests have swept through the region—Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, Haiti, Puerto Rico. And it’s not just Latin America—people have been taking to the streets in Hong Kong, France, Spain, Sudan, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, all over the world.
While all of these protests are unique to their context, the thing that seems to unite many of them is not simply a demand for the resignation of a president or the reform of a labour policy. While these demands may have provided the impetus for a given protest, increasingly, people are decrying an entire broken system that has allowed increasingly extravagant lifestyles for the already rich at the expense of those who are already struggling to get by. All over the world, people aren’t asking for a small change within the existing system—they’re asking for something completely new.
Members of the Anabaptist Mennonite Christian Church of Ecuador participate in protests in Quito in October.
A few weeks ago, I called a colleague to Haiti to ask him, in my increasingly rusty Creole, what he thought about the upheaval that was taking place there. Protests against government corruption and a collapsing economy have been going on since 2018, but they reached a new level of intensity in the fall of 2019. Schools closed for months, some of them having barely opened, and offices and activities throughout the country ground to a halt. Thousands of Haitians took to the streets demanding the resignation of President Jovenel Moise, who has been implicated in an enormous corruption scandal and has stubbornly refused to step down. As in so many other places throughout the world, these protests have swelled to encompass almost everything at one time or another—labour conditions in various sectors, human rights, the role of the international community.
As unrest continued and it became clear that government either couldn’t or wouldn’t respond, powerful armed gangs and other shadowy figures began taking advantage of the chaos for their own ends. For those already living on the brink, life is becoming unbearable: analysts warn that an economic and humanitarian crisis is just over the horizon. My colleague, who has lived through a dictatorship, coups, military juntas, and the devastating 2010 earthquake, told me it was the most chaotic, complicated situation he had ever seen in his country.
“Is there any hope?” I asked, my heart sinking.
“Well yes, of course we have hope,” he said. “We have hope because we know things can’t continue like this—something has to change. And as we say in Haiti, vwa pep la se vwa Bondye. The voice of the people is the voice of God.”
Protests in Chile. Photo: Guido Coppa
Before I moved to Haiti, I worked as the worship coordinator at an Anglican church in Winnipeg. I’m no biblical scholar, but over the years I worked at the church, I got familiar with the readings for the various parts of the church year and the threads that run through them. In the weeks leading up to Christmas, many of the readings are encouragements to be patient, to wait, to prepare. For example, there’s this reading from Isaiah:
“In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain.”
Or this reading, from James:
“Be patient, therefore, beloved, until the coming of the Lord. The farmer waits for the precious crop from the earth, being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains.”
I’m about as much of a farmer as I am a biblical scholar, but after having visited quite a few farms in the course of my work, what I’ve observed is that “waiting for the early and the late rains” involves quite a lot of work: maybe it means walking a long way to find water, or collecting manure and spreading it among the plants, or picking pesky little bugs off the leaves one by one.
Marcelin Pierre-Fritz in his garden near St Jean du Sud, Haiti. Photo: Annalee Giesbrecht
We often think of waiting as the opposite of action, passive, a non-activity. But when I think about what “peace on earth” might mean—a peace that requires justice, a peace here and now on this earth—it seems to me like what we’re being asked to do during Advent is to actively prepare for and participate in creating the conditions that make a new world possible. And I think the people who are taking to the streets of their cities all over the world, demanding something better than what the rich and the powerful have given them, are trying to do exactly that.
I don’t want to be too romantic about all this. I know it’s just a coincidence that all these protests are happening during Advent—most of them started weeks, months, even years ago. Large-scale mobilizations come with a lot of problems: they can be appropriated by power-hungry opposition leaders or infiltrated by violent actors; innocent people get hurt in the general chaos, and already fragile livelihoods take a serious hit when the daily life of an economy is brought to a halt. Polarization filters into homes and workplaces, driving family and friends apart, making genuine and thoughtful conversations feel almost impossible. And of course, protests themselves aren’t the end goal of social change: a lot of hard work is taking place behind the scenes, and hard work will continue in the weeks, months, years after people leave the streets.
But when I see photos of millions of Chileans in the streets, crowds of Haitians peacefully waving leafy green branches, Colombians on their balconies banging pots and pans—I hear the voice of the people crying out for a new world, one where the lowly are lifted up and the hungry are filled with good things, and I can’t help but hope that one day, despite all the obstacles, we’ll get it (just about) right.
Annalee Giesbrecht was once the worship coordinator of St Margaret’s Anglican Church in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and is now the Context Analyst and Advocacy/Communications Coordinator for MCC in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Header photo: A novena is a Colombian Christmas tradition. Every night during the nine days before Christmas, family and friends gather to sing and pray together. In Bogota, DiPaz, an ecumencial peace platform where MCC partner Justapaz: the Christian Mennonite Association for Justice, Peace and Nonviolence, particpates, organized a novena in memory of all those who have been assassinated by armed groups in 2017 in defense of their land and community. People from different faith traditions and organizations, including members of Justapaz and MCC Colombia, gathered to light candles, pray, and sing in a public act of remembrance. (MCC photo/Anna Vogt)