“Be patient, brothers and sisters,
until the coming of the Lord.
See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth,
being patient with it
until it receives the early and the late rains.
You too must be patient.
Make your hearts firm,
because the coming of the Lord is at hand.
Do not complain, brothers and sisters, about one another,
that you may not be judged.
Behold, the Judge is standing before the gates.” (James)
Dear Friends,
The reading above is from the second reading for this Sunday taken from the Letter of James. It expresses so well the Advent theme of waiting. James encourages us to be like the farmer awaiting the spring rains – be patient.
But patience is often hard to come by. I hear it repeated often – “I keep praying for patience, Father, but God just keeps giving me more challenges.” We all probably know why patience should be in our lives. It is a virtue. Proper people have it. Impolite people don’t. It is a help to others. It makes the world a better place for everyone. Jesus was patient, Mary was patient, God is patient. So, why can’t we be patient? Maybe, we are actually impatient about gaining patience.
Since patience is so tough for us, perhaps a better way to look at Advent is through the lens of “anticipation”. I recently read an essay where a mother was lamenting her failure to give her children time to anticipate going out to a movie. She surprised them. And, because she surprised them, they did not enjoy it as much. If they would have had a day or two to think about it they would have told their friends, they would have dreamed about it, they would have told their stuffed toys about it, etc.
Anticipation is the shaping and reshaping of an event through the dreaming about it. When we have an insufficient amount of time to anticipate an event, we may not experience the event in its fullness. The person who anticipates this or that thing experiences it a hundred times before experiencing it once. In those hundred experiences, you live inside the event, you discover the dimensions, you speculate, you may even go through moments of disappointment before it even happens.
I have often found this true for students at school. If I tell them that tomorrow is “going to be a surprise,” their expectations and hopes run wild. What I finally offer them, may not meet the highest reaches of their fantasy. On the other hand, if I tell them that tomorrow will be a regular day, then there is no anticipation at all. Anticipation of any kind is a kind of hunger. The anticipated life is the spicy life.
Advent is our time of anticipation. We dream, we hope, and we tell our friends about what it will be like when the Son of God appears. We light candles in the darkness. We sing songs against the cold. We decorate our homes and hearts with love to dispel the winter gloom. We announce the birth of the long awaited Messiah.
If we eagerly anticipate the coming of Christ rather than simply patiently waiting for him to get here, then perhaps we can live as James suggested: we can make our hearts firm and find no need to complain about our brothers and sisters.
Peace,
Fr. Damian