This coming Sunday is the first Sunday of Advent. Most fundamentally Advent is the word we use to describe the four-week period of time leading up to Christmas. Most profoundly Advent is a season of heart-attentiveness, allowing for an experience of interior emptiness.
Put that way, Advent doesn’t sound too appealing, does it? Yet, it can be one of the most profound liturgical seasons. It is so because the effect of the kind of heart-attentiveness which Advent promotes is the very thing that allows for the experience of the birth of Christ’s fullness within!
How? Well, Advent is meant to be a time when we actually slow down long enough to notice, our hearts’ longings and yearnings. Many of us keep our lives busy for the very reason that we don’t LIKE experiencing our inner aches. We fill our lives with distractions as a way of avoiding or as a way of trying to fill our hearts so we aren’t aware of the ache. We fill our hearts with people, material things and thrilling experiences. In fact, we all know of people whose lives have been ruined in their desperate drive to fill that empty interior space―sometimes in destructive and unhelpful ways.
The Advent invitation is to just notice the heart-hole, notice the longing, notice the yearning and notice the ache―without filling it up! These human longings are symbolically communicated during Advent with unlighted candles on the evergreen wreath. We sense in this visual reminder that the fullness of Life and Light will be ours even if we don’t experience that fullness in the present moment.
So, in the spirit of Advent let us try NOT to fill our heart-hole with anything else. Let us consciously experience our inner yearning, knowing that we will be surprised with great JOY, when God’s Very Self, through Christ, fills our hearts to overflowing! THEN we can really celebrate Christmas!
United in prayer during this holy season,
Maureen Glavin, rscj
