First Sunday of Advent
 

Advent comes from the Latin Adventus, arrival. It is a season of great hope, anticipation, expectation: the arrival, the birth of the long promised Redeemer. We know this.

But it is also a penitential season, a season of metanoia, of repentance, a change of mind, a change in thinking, that is a turning away from sin – in preparation for the arrival of the Christ-Child, the Innocens Patri, the Innocent of the Father, the Sinless One.

In this sense we know – not when Christ will come – but when He came.

We also know that He will come again.

We simply do not know when. And so Christ admonishes us today to be mindful of this reality, a reality we have all painfully experienced in the death of some we have loved. Yesterday we broke bread, today we parted ways.

We know what it is like to stand in that fallow field from which one loved has been taken ... the summer sun bronzed our faces in our youth ... and a breath of winter, out of season, out of time, swept through, all the flowers withered  ... the soil that we had sown with dreams, now falls from our hands on wreathes of memories that fall lastingly into a sad earth, dark with the death of dreams.

But a breath separates our joy from sorrow.

Christ has come. Out of time. Out season. Out of place. And at a time we knew not, nor could have begun to anticipate.

Adventus ... arrival – not as past but as present.

We prepare for His birth ... but not for our death. We rejoice in His having come ... but not in His coming.

Yes, let us prepare for His coming. As having come ... and as yet to come.

If we love truly and well, we will rejoice in both.

Is it not beautiful that Mary laid Him lovingly in a Manger of straw? The Field, after all, is His.

And we are the harvest.
 

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