EVERY DAY IS ADVENT
We begin to
bring to a close this time of waiting and of preparation. We begin to turn our
attention now more seriously, more immediately, to the celebration of
Christmas. It is still Advent, certainly, and the season still points to the
future, but for most of us, I imagine, it points to only about one day into the
future. But even though all this is true, there is still a sense in which, long
after Christmas is over and forgotten, it will be Advent. It will still be
Advent because we will still be waiting and preparing.
There is a
sense in which all of our life is an Advent, and to celebrate this season is to
celebrate being human. The prophet Micah speaks to this in the first reading.
He speaks of hope, a virtue that has kept the human spirit alive from
generation after generation. Over the centuries, it is a hope that has been
focused on many different things and many different people. But that hope is
always expressed in the same way. "When this person comes, or that event
happens, then our lives will be changed, things will be better."
As Luke
struggles for images to describe the origin of Jesus in today's Gospel, he
settles on the spirit, the style, and even the vocabulary of the Old Testament
story we read in Micah. Mary becomes the Ark of the Lord. It is the unborn John
who leaps. It is Elizabeth who asks, "How does this happen to me that the
mother of my Lord should come to me" (Lk 1:43)?And so again, that age old,
life-giving hope becomes focused. This time it is focused on Christ, the final
fulfillment of that hope. I think this journey that Mary makes is really a
puzzling image with which to bring the season of Advent to a close. It seems
like such a commonplace, ordinary thing to do. We might have expected to see
something more dramatic from someone who had just been told she was to become
the mother of God. The trip was simply something that needed to be done. It was
a real part of her life and whether or not it was divinely dramatic or
spectacular, isn't important.
Actually,
nowhere else in the Gospel is Mary ever pictured as doing anything particularly
spectacular. Her whole life was made up of entirely commonplace, everyday
events. And there is a great truth in that; a powerful revelation. No one's
life is ever made important or valuable by the things that they accomplish or
by the things that happen to them. It is very much the other way around.
Believers invest whatever they do, wherever they are, with infinite value and
importance by the faith and the willingness with which they do it. So perhaps
this image of Mary is a very appropriate one with which to close this Advent
season. The image of a very simple and very direct faith, exercised under
really very ordinary circumstances. But a faith which, because it is exercised,
makes those circumstances anything but ordinary.