I confess, my soul is weary of symbolically lighting the candles of hope, joy, peace, and love. Not because the Advent themes aren’t worthy invitations, but rather because of the distance between their reality and our current collective experience. So this year, I’ve decided to write about the shadows of Advent: the adverse conditions, the postures we hide behind, the spirits that quietly erode our capacity to live in harmony together.
I suspect the age we’re living in has done more than distract us. It has begun to deform us. With so many meta-stories available, so many influences competing for our attention and allegiance, we’ve become oddly malleable…shaped and reshaped by narratives we seldom examine for their worthiness or intention.
It’s not simply that we consume too many stories; it’s that we are consumed by them. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, we have become people who cannot imagine beyond them. So, rather than letting the story of Christmas reshape our imagination of the world, we bring our already-storied selves into the moment, shaping Christmas around ourselves.
Lately I’ve been thinking about the story of Babel as a mirror of our present day. It’s a story about the loss of shared language, the fracture of communication, an abrupt end of the illusion that we all understand the same thing in the same way. I suspect we are living in a near-Babel reality today—not because we are suddenly speaking different languages, but because consciousness-sets are diverging at a pace we can’t keep up with.
Today, we inhabit the same world, but not the same experiences. The same headline, the same neighbor, the same event is filtered through wildly different frames of consciousness—political, cultural, economic, theological, generational, algorithmic. Unlike in Babel, where the scattering was immediate, our scattering has been slow and mostly concealed by our therapeutic attachment to technology. Connectivity gives the appearance of cohesion long after the substance of shared meaning has dissolved. We are divided, but networked; isolated, yet surrounded by each other’s curated performances of life.
And perhaps this is why, in the first week of Advent, I am mindful of the need for tolerance. Not tolerance in the thin, corporate-slogan sense. Not a bland acceptance of anything and everything. I mean something closer to an intentional posture of grace—an inner spaciousness. A refusal to collapse another person into a single idea, a single choice, a single moment. A practice that interrupts harsh judgment long enough for us to notice the humanity we were about to overlook.
Because judgmental dismissal is almost automatic. It happens before thought, before context, before curiosity. It’s the reflex of our age. Headline scrolling has trained us to make snap assessments, to know instantly and confidently what we think about a stranger or a situation we’ve encountered for all of three seconds. We have become disciples of our own certainty. And like bad AI, we consume our own interpretations thinking we are original and novel. The more certain we feel, the further we drift from one another. And the candle of hope is snuffed out by our snorts of judgment.
Yesterday, a friend reminded me of a popular phrase in the AA Big Book: the common failure of “contempt prior to investigation.” I’m not sure I’ve encountered a phrase that more accurately describes our present atmosphere. Contempt—even mild, socially acceptable contempt—has become a daily default. It’s the subtext of our conversations, the posture of our politics, the silent driver of our interactions. And all of it is rooted in conclusions we draw before ever truly seeing.
Contempt prior to investigation is an addiction to our own way of thinking. It’s a comfortable high of the ego—one that doesn’t question our own opinions or require any measure of curiosity. And like any addiction, it shrinks our circles until the world becomes uninhabitable for anyone who isn’t just like us.
The practice of tolerance, then, is a kind of sobriety. Not a moral achievement, but a practice of restraint. Perhaps even a practice of hope. It invites a pause between stimulus and reaction. It asks us to be curious rather than hurried, generous rather than defensive, hopeful rather than in despair. It interrupts contempt before it hardens the heart. And this is precisely the Advent work we need!
What if the first step toward any future worth longing for is simply this: choosing not to allow our first reaction to be our final word?
This doesn’t mean sacrificing conviction. It doesn’t mean erasing difference. In fact, genuine tolerance depends on difference. It acknowledges distinct cultures, histories, traditions, languages, and ways of seeing. It doesn’t flatten those things into a bland universalism; it honors the particularity of each. Tolerance is what allows true pluralism to exist without dissolving into homogeneity. It says, I will not require you to be like me in order for you to belong.
In a Babel-like age, tolerance is more than politeness—it becomes necessary for survival and perhaps our last best hope for a different world. The alternative is a cycle of reciprocal dehumanization, each side convinced the other is not just wrong but incomprehensible, unreachable, and ultimately, disposable. Many communities are already living inside that cycle. Many relationships have buckled under its weight. And if we continue without interruption, the cultural scaffolding we take for granted—norms, faith stories, institutions, shared reference points—will keep eroding.
As I read this week’s Advent passages, I find myself returning to the closing words of Psalm 122: “I will seek your good.” Whether or not one is religious, there is something deeply human about that line. Something that crosses boundaries. Something that makes space for a world that is not yet visible.
Imagine if the deliberate choice—to seek the good of the other—became the basic rhythm of our everyday interactions. Imagine if every conversation carried even a faint echo of that intention. Imagine if our disagreements were grounded not in the need to win but in the desire to understand.
Seeking another’s good doesn’t mean agreeing with them. It means not writing them off. It means recognizing that their flourishing is tied, somehow, to our own. It means remembering that difference is not a threat; it is the texture of a shared life.
So perhaps igniting the first candle of Advent this year is about learning not to extinguish each other. To give hope. Perhaps the invitation of this week is a simple, steady practice:
- To pause before judgment.
- To investigate before contempt.
- To hold space for another’s story before collapsing it into our own.
- To seek the good of the other—even when it costs us the comfort of our certainty.
Tolerance then, may very well be the most necessary spiritual discipline of our time. For we are living in a moment when communication is fraying, when experience is diverging, when compassion is strained, when communities are brittle. And in such a moment, even the smallest acts of tolerance become radical—and hopeful—invitations of repair.
At its core, Advent teaches us to expect what we cannot yet see. And perhaps the work of this first week is to become the kind of people who can see differently to begin with. People who resist the seduction of contempt. People who practice curiosity in a weary world. People who seek the good of those who have become “other” to us.
This may not rebuild a Babel-like world, but it may be enough light to help us find one another in the dark.
Shane Ash 