“WAITING is rarely fun,” the Archbishop of York, admits, introducing Do Not Be Afraid as his Advent recommendation.

It was W. H. Vanstone who put waiting on the map as a rich theme for pastoral theology, in his classic book The Stature of Waiting (1983). Rachel Mann pays him generous tribute, but ranges more widely and informally in these daily meditations for Advent, each concluding with an eloquently simple short prayer and questions to help to embed her thoughts in the reader’s experience.

Those familiar with the author’s prolific output will not be surprised that she draws easily both on popular culture (she has a particular devotion to Strictly Come Dancing) and on literary culture, featuring Emily Dickinson and Jane Austen (a meditation that borrows from the concluding reflection of her Jane Austen Lent book last year).

Nor will they be surprised that she writes a good deal about her personal experience, and is not shy of exposing her frailties, whether it is the depression that she has encountered, or thoughts arising as she waits for a bowel examination (“Our God knows us from the inside out”).

Yet, in every instance, she takes us through her personal stories to the Christian story. She has an ability to put a lot of theology into a simple statement — “Jesus comes into our midst and shows us the deepest reality of the world” — and an enviable gift for Christian wisdom sharply expressed: “We all live in the wake and after-flow of other lives”; “waiting on God in such a way that we — slow creatures that we are — have an opportunity to catch up with the grace that is going ahead of us”.

Time and again, she returns to the gospel of “the unconditional generosity and abundance of God’s love”, a message of grace and acceptance thrown into relief against her brief account of the emotional constriction of growing up as a boy longing to be a girl.

“I think the grace and gift of God can not only be found in waiting but is often discovered most profoundly there.” Do Not Be Afraid may not pay much attention to the more traditional eschatological dimension of Advent waiting, but it encourages us to recognise with Advent hope the God who is waiting in unexpected aspects of our own mixed experience of waiting.

The Revd Philip Welsh is a retired priest in the diocese of London.

Do Not Be Afraid: The joy of waiting in a time of fear (The Archbishop of York’s Advent Book 2024)
Rachel Mann
SPCK £10.99
(978-0-281-09001-3)
Church Times Bookshop £8.79