Made New

While waiting for Advent and preparing for it as a catechist, I am drawn more and more deeply into my lifelong love of this season, now that I am in a season of grief. Advent longing and expectation express the surge from the heart of the mourner, tired of dwelling in this vale of tears and exile. More than at any other time in the year, the world comes alongside the griever in the Advent season and waits. 

As one blogger describes it:

Advent, like grief, reminds us that the world is broken and we long for all to be made right. Advent invites us not to rush to the Nativity, but to cry out from the darkness.  Advent reminds us of the promise, that we will be restored. The Lord is already at work in your grief, even if you don’t feel it yet. Being made new in the depths of your heart can take a very long time.

 

Grief is a reminder that this world is not our home. It brings an ardent longing for Heaven. After my son died, I didn’t know how to be here without him. Grief taught me to detach from the world and gave me an eternal perspective. Advent invites us to the same.

That call to be made new is echoed at this blog too:

Whenever we lean into loss to seek the ways God is calling us forward in faith, we testify to the work of God, who will make all things new.

In the stories of Advent, God shows up unexpectedly. God turns destruction into hope when the temple falls in Jerusalem (Mark 13). In the work of John the Baptist, God points to a reality greater than we could have imagined (Mark 1:7-8). When the psalmist and the prophets think that all is lost, God shows up. We see God showing up in Mary’s vulnerable strength and trust that God will fulfill God’s promises (Luke 1).

In our grief, what bigger promise do we seek than God showing up, with our loved ones in tow? As Christians, we do not grieve as people without hope (1 Thessalonians 4:13). We grieve as people of hope—hope that God will fulfill God’s promises. With deft determination, we can seek the ways God fulfills God’s promise to turn our mourning into dancing (Psalm 30:11).

There are moments when the ache makes me desire to leave, but I turn with trust to follow the example of those who were witing for the Messiah, as Henri Nouwen describes them:

Those who are waiting are waiting very actively.  They know that what they are waiting for is growing from the ground on which they are standing.  That’s the secret.  The secret of waiting is the faith that the seed has been planted, that something has begun.  Active waiting means to be present fully to the moment, in the conviction that something is happening where you are and that you want to be present to it.  A waiting person is someone who is present to the moment, who believes that this moment is the moment.

A waiting person is a patient person.  The word patience means the willingness to stay where we are and live the situation out to the full in the belief that something hidden there will manifest itself to us.  Impatient people are always expecting the real thing to happen somewhere else and therefore want to go elsewhere.  The moment is empty.  But patient people dare to stay where they are.  Patient living means to live actively in the present and wait there.  Waiting, then, is not passive.  It involves nurturing the moment, as a mother nurtures the child that is growing in her. 

Wait for the Lord, whose day is near.