Advent I | Wonderful Counselor

Some mornings I sit on my couch with a cup of coffee in hand and a candle burning on the end-table whilst wild forces course through my body: feeling them, honoring them, and allowing them their fearsome presence. Usually I open my bible, usually I say prayers, sometimes I journal. But sometimes there’s too much of a wild rumpus inside to do much else.

On one such morning a while back, I found myself climbing down the spines of these leviathans into certain memories. Important ones. Mostly painful. But there was one that stood out.

The early-’80s are quite vivid for me; though they were a rush a sorrow and bewilderment. I was born in 1975. In 1980 my parents were divorced. In 1982 my dad remarried and a complicated blended family was formed. In 1983 my mom moved across the country to take a job. It was a lot but it was all I knew. It was a childhood punctuated by disruptions.

In what I believe was the summer of 1983, I went to a church camp in the mountains west of Colorado Springs. A sweet little property called Camp Elim. I loved camp. It was a true escape for a hurting boy.

As I recall, each camper was assigned another camper to secretly encourage with little gifts and notes throughout the week. On the final night there was a gift exchange during which each benefactor would be revealed. I had gone to the general store and purchased candy and made a creative little note, tying them together with a piece of yarn. As we made our way into the dining hall (pictured above) we deposited our parcels into a box at the doorway. I was dropping my gift into the box when, to my horror, I saw the candy slip away from the card and the two become separated! I sought to reach out and fix the problem, but there was much commotion, and the gift-box attendee forbid me from doing so, telling me to go inside.

I could not go inside. I was crushed and distressed. Instead I walked to the steps outside the dining hall as the last few campers trickled in and began weeping alone. Looking back, I was weeping in a way that was a little about the tragedy at hand and a lot about cascading tragedies I had no way of comprehending. A barrage of losses that I’d endured in private pain.

I wept and wept. And I knew no one would meet me there. They never did. That was probably why I wept so hard. I knew for certain I would eventually need to walk back into the dining hall empty-handed, red-eyed, disgraced. So I sat on those steps and wept hot tears.

“Hey! Are you ok?” I heard a concerned voice inquire. Through blurred vision, I beheld a counselor standing before me; a young man, maybe 15, with a kind face and a shock of brown hair. His name was Chip. Chip MacEnulty. And he appeared as an angel in my sorrow.

Through a spasm of crying, I recounted what had happened and how I’d been prevented from remedying the catastrophe.

“Let’s take care of that!” he piped. “C’mon!”

He whisked me off to the counselor supply room and immediately found a stash of candy. He gave me construction paper and art supplies, so I could re-create my gift. We secured the candy to the card – using ample tape! I had a moment to wipe away my tears. The whole thing took only a couple minutes, but as I sat on my couch the other morning I was certain it had altered my life.

Chip had met me mercifully in my distress. Chip was a wonderful counselor!

It was this realization that leveled me: how desperately I needed – and still need! – a wonderful counselor. It seemed to be some kind of Advent reflection.

I picked up my phone and opened my bible word-study app. I wanted to dig into this astonishing Isaiah 9 passage that swept George Frideric Handel into an transcendent state:

For to us a child is born,
    to us a son is given,
    and the government will be on his shoulders.
And he will be called
    Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
    Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
(Is. 9:6 NIV)

As I explored the text, I was a bit confused. You see, every English version reads as though Isaiah recorded four titles of this mysterious child who was to be born unto us: four adjectives modifying four nouns. But this isn’t the case! The word wonderful (פֶּלֶא pelé) is actually a noun meaning “something surpassing, extraordinary.” The word counselor (יוֹעֵץ֙ yā’as) is a participle verb meaning “to direct or advise.” This child, this son born to us, is a wonder-counselor within all his offices, this child would chiefly counsel us into wonder or, perchance, counsel wonder back into us. Which is to say, he must counsel us out from disillusionment.

Now I’ve been coming to terms lately about the beating my sense of wonder has taken of late; it has become quite badly bruised. Not a few times I have found myself back in the throes of despondency with that weeping boy on the steps of the lodge at Camp Elim. Can you relate? There are times when we collectively sense important things to be slipping away; times we feel utterly powerless to prevent or undo calamities. There are times we doubt together whether anyone will arrive to help us in our turmoil. Indeed, we may’ve determined none will.

This is when we need Advent the most. This is the “Advent darkness,” of which theologian Fleming Rutledge writes, “where there is no human hope whatsoever and the only possibility is the impossibility of the intervention of God.” She draws our attention to the Advent poetry of W.H. Auden where we discover ourselves, “Alone, alone, about our dreadful wood,” crying out, “Nothing can save us that is possible.” It’s true.

The prophet Isaiah lived and wrote in days of waning wonder. The northern kingdom of Israel had recently been decimated by the notoriously brutal Assyrian forces. In a twist of the knife, king Ahaz of the southern kingdom of Judah not only refused to support Israel but instead leagued with the Assyrian despot Tiglath-Pileser III during his regional campaign of ethnic cleansing. He would displace and scatter the northern tribes such that they would scarcely be heard from again.

As Isaiah wrote his words, a vulnerable Judah felt Assyria’s menacing encroachment. God’s people were “walking in darkness” and “living in the land of the death-shadow.” (v. 2) Ever voracious, evil never compromises. Yet the prophet wrote of an end of their anguish and gloom: a dawning of glory and great light, renaissance and unspeakable joy, liberation and enduring safety. By what means? A child. “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. (v. 6)

The tenses and possessives are irregular: this child is born, is given, the event has happened; somehow, somewhere, if only in the mysterious inklings of God. Though his unambiguous shouldering of all government must wait, inevitable though we’re assured it shall be. And the possessives insist he is ours, yet we all shall eventually be within his domain. He is ours, and we are his, and he will set our world to rights! These are the facts: the wonderful facts.

Though Isaiah – swept along as he was by the Spirit – recorded such resolute declarations, they were meant for days of bleak waiting: for dashed hopes, for betrayals, for sieges, for exile, for vexation, for heartbreak. This was the foreseeable future of Isaiah and all others who saw with human eyes in his days. A diminution of wonder. Talmudic writings strongly suggest that Isaiah was sawn in two at the behest of Judah’s godless king Manasseh.

Isaiah foretold realities which he himself could only “welcome from afar.” And though he looked ahead while we, in part, look back we have in common with him that these wondrous facts can seem quite detached from the tenebrosity of our world; just as a nice note might become detached from the sweetness of its gift. Indeed, the writer of Hebrews collects us together with Isaiah and all the cloud of straining witnesses, insisting, “God had planned something better for us so that only together with us would they be made perfect.” (11:40) Misery loves company, I suppose.

And so we wait or rather wade through what Bunyan called “the Slough of Despond,” tracing the boggy steps of all Advent pilgrims who have, at one point or another, felt Auden’s pronouncement: “The Pilgrim Way has led to the Abyss.” God have mercy.

Advent will never prohibit our tears; never imply we are making much ado about nothing. Advent testifies that our tears run deeper and truer than we know. In fact, Advent bids us weep until we encounter One for whom our tears are worthy. Most are not. So find a step or a couch or a floor or maybe even a shoulder, and cry. Advent is a season for that. It is when the tears go dry that we must be concerned.

This Advent child, the son born to us, has come to perish our gloom once and for all, for He is the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace! “Of the increase of his government and peace there will be no end!” (v. 7) Yet first and foremost, he makes wonder counseling his business. In His day, he sat and wept with many a sorrowing soul – kids and grownups alike – for the very fact of their tears owned the truth of a land so needful of comfort, if not repair. And the fact of this child’s first coming and weeping owns a truth for us also: the truest truth of Advent.

He comes.

Weep and wonder, wonder and weep. Your cries – our cries! – form a choral resistance. We refuse to accept this godless world; refuse to accept any divine absenteeism! What Isaiah glimpsed from afar has happened indeed, the child was born to our world. We know him as Jesus, yet Isaiah said we might as well call him “Immanuel” – God with us. Now we gaze back at this child from afar, most especially when we doubt the aptness of Isaiah’s moniker. Moreover, with Isaiah and every other soul put asunder by the world as it is, we strain through tear-blurred vision for the final Advent, when our Counselor shall suddenly appear to “wipe every tear from our eyes.”

It is a way of seeing peculiar to Advent, by which God’s approach is only perceptible through the prism of our tears. It is a way of praying by which the Advent is most assuredly summoned.

A child is born to us. Our wonderful Counselor is already on the move!