I can’t recall any mention of the season of Advent in the church of my youth—a Missionary Baptist congregation located on the southern border of central Virginia. In our congregation, we started singing Christmas (not Advent) hymns and carols on the first Sunday of December and, with gusto and vigor, sang them right through Christmas. Full stop. Always sung at the annual Christmas play, the “12 Days of Christmas” began and ended with the song. Our trees went up immediately after Thanksgiving and, for most of us, were taken down before or on New Year’s Day.

If we didn’t observe Advent in our Baptist congregation, there was certainly no mention of the season in the Apostolic churches I attended on Sunday afternoons and evenings with extended family members. In those churches, the first verses of “Joy to the World” and “Silent Night” were pretty much all you got.

As is the case with many seminarians coming from churches that didn’t follow the liturgical calendar, it wasn’t until I took preaching and worship courses—and encountered American Baptist, AME, and UCC faculty and students—that I was introduced to the seasons of the liturgical year. While part of me understood it, there was honestly very little visceral resonance. I didn’t know the hymns, the traditions, or the rhythms associated with the seasons. My liturgical calendar consisted of church and choir anniversaries, women’s and men’s days, homecomings, rainbow teas, convocations, revivals, and midnight musicals.

Since graduating from seminary, I’ve worked in seminaries and served in pastoral and music ministry in various congregations, primarily UCC and Lutheran, where the season of Advent was observed with significant intentionality and creativity. Having to lead worship, preach, and plan music during Advent provided an opportunity to find ways to make the season make sense—moving it beyond the realm of liturgical tourism. As a Black queer man who has journeyed with myriad issues common among folks living on the margins—depression, body dysmorphia, and far too many years of vocational angst—finding resonant Advent themes required little effort.

Image 1: Untitled Mixed Media Collage. Artist: Kendal Brown

Literal and metaphorical long, dark nights; themes of waiting, hope, and expectation—these can be standard-issue companions for Black queer Christian existence. “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,” with its restrained lyrics pointing to hope set in a mournful minor key, sums up nicely where I reside emotionally most of the time.

While I consider myself to be a motley mix of several denominational identities and religious traditions, at my core, I will always be one who was claimed at an early age by the fervor and depth of the Pentecostal tradition. Though we are oftentimes quibbling lovers, Black Pentecostalism is the place where I feel most alive and connected to Blackness and the ancestors. While the Pentecostal church did not provide a context where Advent was observed, it did provide grounding in a practice central to the heart and soul of Advent. There were no Advent wreaths or candles, no designated colors in the Apostolic church, but there was abundant spiritual formation around cultivating the expectation of God’s inbreaking: waiting, emptying oneself, tarrying.

Though tarrying was and is most often spoken of in relation to the Pentecostal experience of Spirit Baptism, the core aspects of tarrying were not confined to a one-time experience. Any church service—any moment during a worship service—could be transformed into a time of communal or individual tarrying. One of the aspects of the experience that still compels me is the expectation, within Pentecostal and Pentecostal-adjacent traditions in Black religious contexts, that the Divine can or will manifest in the midst of any worship experience. That, in our midst, God just might do something today that God has never done before.

Any prayer meeting could be instantly transformed into a tarry service. In those services of my youth, congregants would be scattered about the sanctuary. Those who were “seeking the Holy Ghost,” healing, or a special visitation were invited to come to the altar and instructed to kneel in front of a makeshift mourner’s bench—typically a folding chair from the fellowship hall. Tarry services were the domain of the devoted and were almost always led by the mothers of the church. Flanked on one or both sides by a church mother experienced in navigating persons through the difficult and uncertain waters of tarrying, the hopeful seeker would be led (sometimes browbeaten), prompted to repeat words, phrases, petitions: “Fill me, Lord. Fill me, Lord. Fill me, Lord. Jesus-Jesus. Jesus-Jesus-Jesus. Jesus.” Repeating “Hallelujah” more than two or three times was enough to produce a stammering tongue—with or without the Holy Spirit’s prompting.

Image 2: Union Street Missionary Baptist Church, Danville, VA. Photographer: Kendal Brown

For me, the journey of Advent is best symbolized by the two church mothers providing seemingly opposing instructions to the seeker. While one church mother encouraged the seeker to “hold on,” the mother on the opposite side would occasionally interject the admonition to “let go.” As I reflect upon my own journey through Advent, “holding on” and “letting go” provide the “how” for moving through the season.

As a young queer boy seeking God’s appearing and tangible presence, I most certainly grappled with feelings of unworthiness, deep angst, and trauma that I’m still working to resolve. I’m almost certain that I doubted whether all of “that stuff”—the tarrying, the speaking in tongues, the spiritual gifts—was really real or really for me. Breaking through required letting go. But it also required holding on. Holding on to the very real knowledge that the Spirit’s presence had claimed me at an early age. I was hard-wired for listening, waiting, and receiving from the Divine. That my spirituality was both strong and sure.

As with tarrying, Advent, for me, is a posture—a reminder that life is best lived with an openness to letting go of the things that prevent us from experiencing the holy in our communal and individual lives. It is also the time for holding on. Holding on to the hope of God’s inbreaking and appearing. Holding on to mystery while rejecting the ever-present temptation to bow at the altars of certainty and having it all figured out.

So, in the spirit of the sainted ones who nurtured and tarried with me in those non-Advent-observing congregations, I pray that your Advent is filled with both contemplation and action; and that it is a generative season of holding on and letting go.

Hold On. Let Go.

Loving Each Other with Our Minds…