It is Advent again, and it will be Christmas again, but what can there truly be that is new after having lived through so many Advents and just as many Christmases?
In reality, everything can be new, and waiting for Christmas can truly mark a newness in everyday life. This is because we are not the people we were last year, a month ago, last week, yesterday⦠and just as we change, so too life, as it unfolds, is a source of newness. But not a cheap kind of newness, not a newness that imposes itself, not a newness that turns everything upside down⦠this, in fact, is a more discreet and silent newness, one that asks to be noticed and welcomed with care and attention; with the gaze of one who takes nothing for granted, but receives everything as a gift.
The Teacher of Waiting
To open ourselves to the newness of Advent that is coming toward us, we let ourselves be guided by a true teacher of waiting: Mary. Who better than her can accompany us during the time that separates us from the coming of Jesus? She can teach us to wait because she herself waits with us for the time to be fulfilled and her Child to be born.
What it means to wait
Mary is the teacher, and Don Tonino Bello is the one who, with his words of love for Mary, opens the door for us to understand what it truly means to wait.
Let us listen to him.
Β«True sadness is not when, in the evening, no one is waiting for you when you return home, but when you no longer expect anything from life.
And you suffer the darkest loneliness not when you find the hearth unlit, but when you no longer want to light it: not even for a possible passing guest. When you think, in short, that the music is over for you. And that everything has already been decided. And that no living soul will come knocking at your door. And there will be no more surges of joy at good news, nor sudden flashes of amazement at an unexpected event. Nor even tremors of pain at a human tragedy: after all, you have no one left to fear for.
Life, then, flows flatly toward an epilogue that never arrives, like a magnetic tape that has finished a song too soon and unwinds endlessly, without saying anything more, toward its final cut.
To wait: in other words, to experience the joy of living.
They even said that a person's holiness is measured by the depth of their expectations. Perhaps it is true. If so, we must conclude that Mary is the holiest of creatures precisely because her whole life seems marked by the joyful rhythms of one who is waiting for someone.
Even the initial designation with which Luke's brush identifies her is laden with expectation: βBetrothed to a man from the house of David.β Betrothed, that is.
No one misses the abundance of hopes and heartbeats evoked by that word, which every woman experiences as the prelude to mysterious tenderness. Before her name is even spoken in the Gospel, Mary is described as betrothed. Virgin waiting. Waiting for Joseph. Listening for the rustle of his sandals at dusk, when, scented with the fragrance of wood and varnish, he would come to tell her of his dreams.
But even in the final frame with which Mary takes leave of Scripture, the camera captures her in an attitude of waiting. There, in the Upper Room, on the upper floor, in the company of the disciples, waiting for the Spirit. Listening for the rustle of his wing at daybreak, when, scented with oils and holiness, he would descend upon the Church to point out its mission of salvation.
Virgin waiting at the beginning. Mother waiting at the end.
And within the arch supported by these two tremors, one so human and the other so divine, a hundred other heartrending waits.
Waiting for him, for nine very long months. Waiting for legal formalities, celebrated with scraps of poverty and the joys of kinship. Waiting for the day, the only day she would have wanted to postpone time and again, when her Son would leave home and never return. Waiting for the βhourβ: the only one for which she would not have known how to restrain her impatience, and whose abundance of grace she would have poured out upon the table of humanity before its time. Waiting for the last gasp of the Only-Begotten, nailed to the wood. Waiting for the third day, lived out in solitary vigil before the rock.
To wait: the infinitive of the verb to love. Indeed, in Mary's vocabulary, to love without end."
(from A Month with Mary)
The Virgin Mary teaches us that to wait is the infinitive of the verb to love, so let this be the program for Advent: love! Always love, in joy, in the light, in understanding... but also in weariness, in the fog, in doubt... certain that we are not alone; we have not been alone since Jesus became one of us. Maranatha, come, Lord Jesus!
Happy Advent to everyone!
