In my latest column from the Global Sisters Report, I examine what it means to engage Advent and move beyond ourselves as we enter more intentionally into this season. How might God be inviting us to make room for new ideas, new emotions, and new conceptions of classic themes that move beyond "me" to "we"? I pray we each may strive for that movement these Advent days. Blessings!
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This Advent I've begun to notice a particular sense of expectancy
all around me. Perhaps the best way to put it is that I have been encountering
pregnant pauses.
Watching as the Advent wreath is blessed and lit at Mass one
day, I find my attention drifting to the woman in the second row of chairs
gently caressing her growing stomach, the soft stretch of maternity-wear
elastic along her sides. A dear friend calls to deliver the news that he and
his wife are expecting, a pulsating wave of ecstatic love and nervous joy
pouring through the phone. A prayer intention of knowing grief hangs in the
quiet of a women's group as a member prays for a friend who has suffered a
miscarriage.
Babies. Mothers. Pregnancy. All around me. Expectancy.
Emotion. Embodiment.
Standing at the entrance of a friend's baby shower, I pause
as I hold a tiny slip of paper. The placard in front of me explains that my
friend and her wife have not yet chosen a name for their little one, who will
arrive very soon. "Suggest a name and tell us the meaning
behind it," the prompt suggests. As I fiddle with my pen, I think of all
that a name holds. I think of the pregnant pauses, the expectancy, and the
virtues I wish for this little one.
I pause to pray for my friends and for the world in which
all these pregnant pauses exist, where peace and flourishing coalesce with fear
and trembling — a world that God chooses to enter and a world where we are
asked to welcome God in.
Without any indication of biological sex, I think of the
myriad names I could offer on that tiny slip of paper — big names that take a
lifetime to live into and names that carry memories and aspirations. With
Advent on my mind, I think of hope, faith, joy and love. What do those things
mean to someone waiting to welcome new life into the world? What do they mean
to someone whose expectancy is met by the unexpected?
Those are the questions we carry with us as we enter into
this Advent season. This time of waiting and reflection prepares us for the
promise of Christmas and yet, as I consider the many pregnant pauses I've
encountered these days, I wonder if it might also invite us to reconceive of
the way in which we prepare to welcome that new life into our lives and our
world.
As I wrote on these pages on the cusp of a Christmas past,
our God "is a God of brokenness … born under cover of night, in the
lowliest of places, fac[ing] insurmountable odds." This is the God we
believe in, the One who became human, who dwelt among us, who became poor to be
one with us at our most vulnerable. I think we can forget this or, perhaps,
choose to look past the fact that God opted for poverty and invites us, in this
season and all seasons, to do the same.
This last point is particularly poignant when considering
how easily Advent can become a season focused on inward, personal
transformation. In the quiet and the waiting, we pray to become something new.
This desire is sincere, no doubt. But whom and for what are we transforming?
In this season of wonder and candle-lit darkness, we pray
that we might be transformed so that God may come to life in us. We ready
ourselves to receive the gifts of the Incarnation and the Christmas graces of
Emmanuel. This is a beautiful desire and admirable goal but if our Advent
actions stop there, we've missed a critical aspect of the season.
The One who is coming, the Christ we ready our hearts to
receive in a new way, is Emmanuel — God with us. Note the plural
there. God with us, not just me. This One is not a personal care
package or a boost to my spirit alone. The Christ is not incarnated in
isolation, confined to the insular creche I prepare in my heart. No, Christ
comes into the world and our lives on a much grander scale. This is the One who
comes for all people, in all places, especially those places that are broken or
abandoned. Our lives and our personal relationship with Jesus may very well be
the avenue through which Christ becomes apparent, but the gift that in that
advent of Christ offered is for everyone.
Broadening our conception of Christ's coming at Christmas
also begs us to reconsider what else about this Advent season we might be
holding captive in the confines of our heart. Recalling how Mary pondered all
things about Jesus in her heart and Joseph reconsidered the plans he had made
in light of God's dream, we're invited with each passing week of Advent to
ponder how Christ's coming calls us to reconceive the themes we meditate on in
this season: hope, faith, joy and love.
The question becomes not only what do these things mean to
me, but what do these concepts mean to us?
Reconciling God's preferential love for the poor with our
own call to love in the world and encounter God in our neighbor begs us then to
reconceive the very themes we meditate upon. In this context, the hope we pray
for, which so often is a plea to God for a personal pick-me-up, becomes a
prayer that we might find hope in what is hidden and offer
hope despite what is unknown. With this hope, our meditation on faith becomes a
seeking of understanding about why God would dwell among us and what our belief
in such incarnation should do in the world. We make room for a faith that is
not independent but interdependent with God and with others.
Finding faith and hope straddling the inner and outer parts
of ourselves, we are surely swept up in reflecting on joy as the full-bodied
rejoicing that God is with us no matter what. More than mere happiness or
expectation, this Advent joy reflects the abundance of God, the fruit of pregnant
pauses that put flesh on the gift of God’s gratuitous love and rejoice in
finding joy and wonder in the existence of others. It is a joy that is not just
about our inner peace but peace on earth and goodwill toward all.
This naturally leads us to love. For God so loved the world
that God sent Jesus, Emmanuel, to be one with us, to dwell in our love and to
unite us in loving relationships of mutuality and grace. Increasing our
awareness through faith, hope and joy, we prepare room for love to finally rest
in the humble dwelling place of our being.
This final movement in the Advent cycle allows us to receive love as God offers it in prayer and in relationship and to offer it, in turn, freely to others and God by opening our hearts in vulnerability and surrender. It is the work of expectancy, emotion and embodiment immaculately conceived in us by God and reconceived over and over in our lifetime. As we undertake this work in a renewed way this Advent, may our prayer bring us beyond ourselves to reconceive of the gifts God offers us … to consider, in this moment, beyond myself, what God might be offering in the expectant waiting of our collective hearts.
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