Pop 89: Something’s Happening
By Madonna Hamel
Advent holds a special place for me. And it’s not just about counting the days ‘til Santa comes, or opening the cute little cardboard calendar and pilfering the chocolates before my siblings do, although that childhood tradition contributed to a sense of anticipation integral to the season. What I love about Advent is the permission and encouragement it gives us to embrace a state of waiting.
The other day I told a friend that “Advent meant waiting.” “Are you sure?” she asked. A fellow etymologist, she was sure it meant “arrival.” Ok, sure, I hastened to explain. But as Catholics, we rest in the waiting room for the arrival. We give some thought to what it is we await. We try to do our best to be alert and prepared for the nativity. Something is happening, and we need to be ready. If not, we will miss it. We need to learn to pay attention. And we get four weeks to practice.
Luckily, I grew up with an appreciation for the swelling sense of Mystery this waiting period brings. For someone who can expect too much from other people and situations, even when I’m warned by others wiser than me that expectations are premeditated resentments, it is a joy to suspend myself in a sense of expectation of the birth of a baby. Mary is expecting, for all of us.
While most waiting rooms are places we usually try to avoid, or rush through, Advent gives us room to wait. I settle into that waiting by making sure I am sitting by the window at dusk, a cup of tea in hand, ready and willing to watch as the snow turns blue. This moment of the day, this liminal space, fills me with a particular awe only possible at this time of year, when the veil between worlds is thin and the Mystery slips through. I don’t believe you need to be a believer to sense that. The nights feel holy. The stars shine brighter. The soul feels its worth.
Once it’s thoroughly dark outside, and I can see the candles and my face reflecting back at me in the window, I open my favourite book for this season, an Advent daily reader called Watch for the Light. It’s a collection of writings by everyone from Thomas Aquinas and Søren Kierkegaard to Annie Dillard and Kathleen Norris. It gives me a chance to consider the full scope of the season.
I’ve just reread, for the fourth time, a beautiful essay by the spiritual writer and priest Henri Nouwen in which he addresses waiting. He reminds us that “fearful people have a hard time waiting,” because when we are afraid, the last thing we want to do is to stay still: “we want to get away from where we are,” whether we are a whole community, a nation, or an individual afraid of being harmed. And the more afraid we are, the harder waiting becomes. Waiting feels like having one’s guard down.
All the more reason to be impressed by Zechariah, Elizabeth, and Mary, says Nouwen. I was re-iterating the gospel story in Luke of Zechariah and Elizabeth to my friend Diana this morning over breakfast, before her cataract surgery. “So, Zechariah is told by an angel that he will be a father, that his wife will have a son. No way, says Zechariah, that’s not possible, she’s past eighty! But Elizabeth is, indeed, pregnant with John the Baptist, and so is her cousin Mary, who travels to be with Elizabeth, so they don’t have to wait alone. In fact, the first encounter between John and Jesus is when the babies leap inside the bellies of their respective moms, recognizing the presence of each other.”
“Wow,” says Diana, “that’s quite the story. Where did you read that?”
The point of the story, I say, is that people who have a promise at the end of a wait can wait far more easily. Nouwen wants to show how waiting is rarely purely passive. In scripture, people wait actively. “A waiting person is a patient person,” writes Nouwen. “Patient people dare to stay where they are. Patient living means to live actively in the present and wait there. It involves nurturing the moment, as a mother nurtures the child that is growing in her. Elizabeth and Mary were very present to the moment. That is why they could hear the angel. They were alert, attentive to the voice that spoke to them and said: don’t be afraid. Something is happening to you. Pay attention.”
But also, adds Nouwen, they could wait because they were filled with hope. And hope is more than wishes; it is “trusting that something will be fulfilled.” Hope allowed Mary to say: “I don’t know what will happen, but I trust that good things will happen.”
My brother, when he had his three brief moments of sight after a stroke knocked out most of his occipital lobe, yelled out a line from Monty Python’s Life of Brian: “Something’s happening, Reg. Something’s actually happening!” It’s become an exclamation of observation for us. My point for telling Diana the Advent story of Zechariah, Elizabeth, and Mary at breakfast is the same point I try to make by re-telling it to myself: to live in trust that something is happening.
“Yes,” agreed Diana. “It’s the power of gestation.”
But, “to wait open-endedly is an enormously radical attitude toward life,” writes Nouwen. “The spiritual life is a life in which we wait, actively present to the moment, trusting that new things will happen to us that are far beyond our imagination, fantasy, or prediction.”
So, we need to wait together, like Mary and Elizabeth did. I tried to be present to my friend before her eye surgery. I try to be present to my brother when the state of his “beehive” busy, swirling eyes gets too much for him. To stand beside him, tuned to the Mystery, ready for whatever comes next.