After the trials and tribulations of a tough year, after what for some has been a time of trauma and tragedy, we know something of the event to come – the event that signals all the hope there is, all the hope that has been hiding in our hearts for far too long.
The event, of course, is the awaited birth of our Savior, the Christ Child, under the skies of Bethlehem, with shepherds gathering and kings following their star to the barn-like cave of the miracle on the outskirts of the town, where raucous travelers fill the inn and the starlight shines like never before.
There the Baby will be born of the Virgin Mary. He will change the world forever, and these are the days we wait for Him. These are the days not only of joyful anticipation, but also of solemn and serious penance. We wait on the Child and His grace to illumine our souls. And we prepare our souls for judgment, hoping beyond hope for His gracious mercy as we wait for Him to come again.
We call it Advent, from the Latin word “adventus,” which means arrival or approach. We approach the Bethlehem manger under our modern, thoroughly secular clouds of consumerism – with society’s elites making it known that the rituals, proclamations and carols of tradition that point to the religious essence of these holy days, that point to that little hay-filled trough and to that Child placed there, will not be tolerated. The secularists insist on excessiveness. We are called to fast. They will take any symbol, no matter how tacky, as long as it doesn’t hint of Christian culture. We have an Advent wreath, where we say our grace by night, with its purple candles of penitential significance. An Advent calendar counts down our days with prayers and devotions until the Christ Child appears in Bethlehem.
If we look at where Jesus came into our world, at Mary and Joseph’s surroundings – the barnyard beasts, the smell of dung in the hay, the ruffians of the hills come to pay respects – it is the perfect picture of what poets are here to do: that is, to take the stuff of our world, the everyday happenstance, the vulgar and the profane, and recover in it that which is sacred. The most exalted of all creatures ever to arrive on earth came to us in the humblest of habitations, in the coarsest, most unhallowed of sites. It was anything but quaint! The Holy Family would have rather been at the inn, warmed and protected from the elements.
It is the world we live in – the drab, lowly, mundane world that we make worthy of reverence – that we come to honor. It is a child’s plea for protection, the physical debilitation of someone close, a challenge accepted and an effort put forth, in joy and in loneliness. It is in the longing for a loved one’s presence or a prayer to one in heaven. It is in a word of kindness, given or received, in reminiscence and in visions of the future, in the rising of bread and the fermenting of the grape – all because it all has come from our Creator.
The Baby in the manger makes everything potentially sacred and reminds us that we are sacred, too, regardless of the trials and tribulations, the sufferings and the transgressions. We are sacred regardless of where we might be found, in a home or by the road, with family in the sunlight of hope or alone in the dark of despair, sitting down by or lying in a deathbed.
We take time to pray for the transformation of the profane into the sacred in the miraculous touch of the Child for whom we wait. He is the same creature who dies upon a cross for our salvation. In eternal time, the Baby emerging from the pure womb of Mary and the gaunt and beaten, hemorrhaging Christ upon His cross are one and the same before us in the present. We wait for His birth, in the hay and in our minds; we wait for His death, upon the cross and in our hearts; we wait for
His Resurrection, from the tomb and in our spirits. We wait for Him to come again. It is all about to happen and all already happening. And we call it Advent.
Fred Gallagher is an author and editor-in-chief with Gastonia-based Good Will Publishers Inc.