HE WHO WAS, WHO IS, AND WHO IS TO COME

 
    Welcome to Advent, the season of waiting and longing for the memorial of the birth of our Savior.  How do we wait?  For what are we actually longing?
 
    No one (in their right mind, at least!) will pig out on potato chips half an hour before  Thanksgiving dinner is served.  Presents under the Christmas tree are not opened on the 22^nd of December.  We don’t sing the Easter “Alleluia” on the 3^rd Sunday of Lent.  
 
 The unifying theme of these three examples is “fasting in anticipation.”  This kind of fasting is not “disciplinary” in the sense that it’s an attempt to come to terms with our sinfulness or to atone for it.  Instead, it’s an example of sharpening the desire, of holding back so that the actual event of the celebration will be that much more intense and joyful.  I have a recording of a monastery of monks singing Easter Gregorian chants, and one of them is especially evocative of the Resurrection:  Salve, Festa Dies (Hail, Day of the [Great] Feast).  But they sing it with the kind of voices (typical of properly performed chant) that are almost breathless with the sense of “We finally made it!  Christ is risen, and we are saved!”  It is the sound of singing from the heart, of a joy that is secured and safe, rather than the joy of exuberance.  They could not have achieved this effect if they had sung this in February…
 
 Our Advent season is marked with wonderful memorials and feasts to help us on our way:  Francis Xavier, the great Jesuit missionary, reminds us (in the words of Pope Francis) to go out to the peripheries to bring Good News to others.  Ambrose, not yet baptized, was made bishop of Milan by acclamation; he said yes to the will of the Lord.  The Immaculate Conception (this year not a Holy Day “of Obligation,” but a central Holy Day nonetheless, especially in our country) is the beginning of the salvation we await for Christmas.  St John of the Cross, the Carmelite mystic, reminds us that the path to God necessarily takes us through the thicket of suffering and the “dark night” when faith is completely bare and so is completely pure.  If we begin with one Jesuit, we end with another: St Peter Canisius, the missionary to the German lands of the Reformation, making sure that the Church is defended by means of example and persuasion and never by compulsion.  All these are great places for us to pray over as we wait.
 
 In the Latin of the ending portion of the Lord’s Prayer (the so-called “embolism”) we pray that we may be “safe from all distress as we await the blessed hope...”  The Latin word is the participle expectantes, which was previously (and, I think, better) translated as “we wait in joyful hope.”  The same root word, expecto, is in our Nicene Creed: “I look forward” to the resurrection and life to come.  Let’s this be the key to our own waiting, expectation, preparation, longing.  Let’s be joyful, even as we wait.  St Paul reminds us: “We walk by faith, not by sight; we are saved in hope” (II Corinthians 5:7; Romans 8:24).  Happy Advent to all!                                                      -Fr. David