We have entered the season of Advent. Its color is purple, but not the penitential purple of lent. It is the magenta or sapphire blue purple of longing. Advent is about the heartache of hope’s longing to find the One my heart loves.
The human family knows deep-down what it wants. It longs for peace. It longs for collaboration. It longs for healing. It longs for the communion that authentic relationship brings. ‘Advent’ means to come or coming to. So the obvious question is “When?” When will these things come, and who will bring them?
Various religious traditions have various answers. The answer given down through the ages in the Christian community called Church has been that only God can bring these things, and God will do this in the broad expanse of time: in the past, in the present, and in the future. But to answer this longing, God will have to enter time. God will have to endure its limitations, be bound by its step-by-step process, suffer its ongoing development. And God did just that. God entered time and wrapped God’s own word in flesh. God asked a young girl to give the Word a body, and when she said yes, God pressed human DNA to God’s Self, never to be parted.
So, the phases of time sometimes become a blur during Advent. God came in the past; God is coming in the present; and God will come in the future. We ponder all of them. The texts of Advent will take us back to when the Word became flesh in Mary’s womb. The texts will point us to the future when the great risen King will come to judge the world. But most challenging of all, will be those texts that awaken us to the realization that he comes daily, every twenty-four hours, when we least expect him, when we might just miss him. So the people of God are filled with longing to see him in the day-to-day, and are filled with the heartache that comes from knowing we often miss him, and miss ministering to him. He wears a thousand disguises. He favors wearing the faces of the lowly ones, those who interrupt our lives, those who bother us with their defenseless need.
We shake each other from our unawareness. The texts try to arouse us to pay attention. And all the while the One we seek has long ago pressed us to his cheek. But our Advent is necessary, because we have been busy about many things, so distracted, in fact, that we haven’t noticed his nearness, if we’re honest. So Advent’s longing heartache is all about a new noticing…he’s here.
He came, you say, “Way back in history…”
or
No, he will be coming in majesty “…better be ready!”
but
now, today, in mystery?
How do I ‘solve’ these surprises?
Ah!
With the heart’s eyes…they will catch him in all his disguises.
