One of the things I find most irritating about myself is that songs get stuck in my head and keep repeating. Something triggers a song, a word or a thought, and round and round it goes! To make it worse, I don’t even have to know more than a few words of the song. It just keeps on going round and round its little circle!

The song going round my head for the last couple of days is ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’. A Rolling Stones classic I remember well, particularly from the dance floor of teenage discos. I don’t think I’ve ever known the lyrics except of the chorus which doesn’t really expand on the title. Looking through the lyrics now, I see they’re not about sexual satisfaction which was what was in my mind when I sang along with everyone else at those dances!

The word satisfaction derives from the Latin satis (enough). So being satisfied is about having enough, about someone doing enough for you. Like St Paul I hope I can be, or learn to be, content in every circumstance whether in need or having plenty – having less than or more than enough (Philippians chapter 4). And mostly I have plenty, so no cause at all to be dissatisfied.

AND YET. The thought that preoccupies me, a bit like the song, is that Advent is a time to be dissatisfied, to acknowledge just how far short of satisfactory the world is. To confess, and to proclaim and to complain, that life is often crap and is unbearable for many here and, even more so, world-wide.

Perhaps that is so obvious it barely needs remarking upon.

Advent is certainly a time to be dissatisfied with myself. Is what I do satisfying others? Satisfying God? A time for repentance. I’m pretty good at acknowledging my failings but not so good at turning from them to better ways! If repentance is a change of attitude and heart, I’ve plenty of work to do.

A time of penance, such as we have in Advent and Lent, is traditionally a time to stop satisfying our own wants/desires and especially the desires of our bodies. The purpose being to learn to be in control of the desires of the flesh, rather than being controlled by them. So, fasting from certain choice foods, or going without for an extended period, is not unusual. Thus our bodies may well cry out ‘I can’t get no satisfaction’ in a way that’s strangely satisfying to us.

But I don’t want to get sucked into an obsession with personal piety (fat chance say you who know me!!). Certainly not one that focuses on this at the expense of the bigger issues of justice and healing in a broken world: the command to love my neighbour as myself.

The Old Testament prophet Isaiah points us to the deeper fasting God requires of us:

“Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice .. to share your food with the hungry …to provide the poor wanderer with shelter .. to spend yourselves on behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness ..” (Isaiah chapter 58)

I think the rubber hits the road in the difficulty of holding together hope and positive thinking (thus Philippians 4 – “whatever is noble … right … pure … lovely … admirable – think about such things”) alongside how life is experienced by so many. We are the people who shine as lights in the darkness, who proclaim that the world is good, that God is good, while so much is not yet right.

I think the only answer, and it’s frequently the only answer, is to hold the opposing poles in tension – in this case to be satisfied and dissatisfied!

Today my daily New Testament reading points me to the Gospel of John chapter 12 which records Jesus as saying:

Those who love their life will lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.

Jesus uses “hate” in a particular Semitic way, but there can be few stronger expressions of dissatisfaction than someone saying “I hate my life”. It’s often said that the Church is there to comfort the disturbed and to disturb the comfortable. That’s surely at least as true now as ever. But for all of us, however disturbed we are, the ‘comfort’ the Gospel gives is more about giving strength than promising slippers by the fireside. And, crucially, to know God the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, walking alongside us. God with us.

One of the geniuses (genii?) of the Church of England (and other churches) is that it channels the Gospel into seasons (around Christmas and Easter) which can help us focus on certain key themes in rotation and not everything at once. So, like the writer of Ecclesiastes (chapter 3) we find there is a time for everything including:

a time to weep and a time to laugh,

a time to mourn and a time to dance.”

At the risk of going on a bit (!) ‘satisfaction’ has a key role in the evolution of theology – summed up in Anselm’s thesis ‘Cur Deus Homo?’ In an 11^th century feudal setting (while Otley Parish Church was being built) Anselm, a Benedictine Monk from Italy who became Archbishop of Canterbury, writes about why it took someone who was both God and human to atone for our sins and open the way to eternal life.

God is like a feudal landlord whom human beings constantly offend by their sins. As with any feudal landlord, God’s honour requires ‘satisfaction’ for the offences which dishonour him. But that debt to God is infinite, reflecting his status and perfect character. A human being living a perfect life is only rendering due honour to God, even by offering his or her life in payment. But if God the infinite becomes a human being, and offers himself or herself, then that sacrifice has infinite value and will (and does) satisfy God’s honour.

The model, like every model of salvation, is flawed, but it highlights the fact that our lives can never fulfil our duty to God. In this sense our lives are always unsatisfactory. But the good news is that he does come to us, he is born as a human being, and does for us what we cannot do for ourselves.

So God invites us to walk the road of satisfaction and dissatisfaction with him. Feeling deeply our need for him, and the world’s desperate need for him. Focusing on this in Advent, and then celebrating in an unfettered way his arrival at Christmas. Not just on Christmas day but in the whole long Christmas celebration up to the sixth of January, which then morphs into the season of Epiphany, which celebrates Christ being made known. After which a new cycle starts on 2^nd February as we approach Lent and prepare for the wonder and mystery of his death and resurrection. Hallelujah!