We wait for that day when we give and receive gifts, when we are together with family, when we gather around a crackling fire and share warm cider or an eggnog. Because we deserve it, and we need it. A small hope, I say, because we live in a world torn by war, abuse, poverty, disease, loneliness, and death in many forms. We and those we love are addicted to narcotics or alcohol, held prisoner by opiates that we use to dull our pain, to escape if only temporarily the pain and loneliness we feel. We are part of families that are convulsed by anger and disappointment at unmet expectations.
Lovable people go without love.
Death and disease separate us from a beloved spouse, child or friend. Our grown children seem seized by an aimlessness, manifested by an inability to plan or work for the future. Unlike our secular, commercialized pre-holiday season, Advent, does not pull people out of the world to wrap themselves in the warm fuzzies of the season. There is, as Thomas Merton writes, an anguished seriousness about Advent. Advent is not about a sentimentality, but about a broken world crying for justice and wholeness, for release from captivity, for God to draw near and set things aright.