I’ve chosen a bright and colourful image entitled ‘Hope’ for our Advent season in the Poustinia.
Expectant hope is the key focus of this much overlooked season in the church’s year. Christmas preparations and festivities seem to begin earlier-and-earlier each year — in our churches as well as in society at large. Hope is a commodity in short supply in today’s world which is overwhelmed by many seemingly intractable crises. Our society’s been called ‘The Anxious Society’ by Jonathan Haidt in a book of that name which has become an international bestseller.
Our Advent image is by the Los Angeles artist, Amber Vittori and was one of fifty pictures from twenty countries commissioned by the not-for-profit global organisation ‘Fine Acts’. The Bulgarian founder, Yana Buhner Tavanier, asked the artists to create images that embodied the theme of hope after the worst of the Covid pandemic subsided. Amber’s image was chosen as the poster for the collection. The Fine Acts pictures continue to inspire as the world seems to lurch from one crisis to another. Yana calls his organisation ‘a playground for social change’. The power of art to inspire change is considerable – whether the visual arts, theatre, film, music or poetry. Art has the capacity to reach our emotions as well as our intellect. It can often have more impact than rhetoric, politics or campaigning.
So, these luminous weeks of Advent are about the expectant hope that one day God’s kingdom will come on earth as it is in heaven as the Lord urged us to pray.
St Augustine said
‘Faith is to believe what you do not see and the reward for this is hope — to see what you believe. That is hope.’
David Hawkins December 2025
