Becoming Expectation
Sister Elise Saggau, OSF
Hope is something completely open-ended. It is not an order we place for how we would like things to be. We don’t get to decide how things will be. What we get to do is rise up each morning and follow the way our life is leading us on that particular day. We watch and we listen. We look for directional signals. We try to perceive how what we believe is already happening. It is taking place in our everyday conflicts and pains, in our tasks and promises, in our families and friends, in our activities and projects, in our hopes and aspirations. These no longer appear to us as a fatiguing variety of things that we can barely keep together. Rather, they begin to appear as affirmations and revelations of the new life of the Spirit happening in us.
Every day lived at this level of consciousness reveals to us that suffering does not diminish just because we are believers in Jesus Christ. But our fundamental decision to live by the values of the Gospel shifts our focus. Each day, each event, becomes an aspect of God’s revelation. Each experience, good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant, has something to reveal to us, something to teach us. We lend an attentive ear to what ordinary everyday events are continually saying to us.
Understood this way, life itself is an Advent. Every single day, we are getting ready for the coming of the Lord. And yet, the Lord has already come and is with us—loving us, calling us, leading us, and will continue to be with us in ways we can hardly imagine. So we must be alert! We have ears to hear and eyes to see. We have all we need to recognize this saving presence at any moment of our lives. It won’t take loud and impressive events to convince us of God’s loving and saving power. It won’t take miracles. The eyes of faith see signs everywhere, every day—a colorful sunrise or sunset, new-fallen snow, stars in a cloudless sky, the smile of a baby, the carefree play of children, words of encouragement and gestures of love offered by friends.
There are many distractions, however. In the midst of all this positive evidence, the world continues to shout, to scream, and to overwhelm us with multiple claims and promises. This is, of course, the very context in which the work of our salvation takes place. So we pray that God will let us know through all our senses that God’s love is more real and more effective than our sins, our failures, and our fears. God is more real than all the world’s noise. And so we wait—we wait to see light in darkness and we wait to hear God’s voice saying: “Why are you afraid, O you of little faith? I am with you always.”
Advent is also a time to realize ever more deeply that God’s coming will slowly transform our whole being into expectation. Eventually, we will no longer have expectations but we ourselves will be expectation. Our whole life will become “waiting.” This kind of waiting does not lead to nervous tension stemming from belief that something spectacular is about to happen—we are not sure just when. On the contrary, the Advent kind of waiting leads to a growing inner stillness and joy. It allows us to realize that the one for whom we are waiting has already arrived and is even now speaking to us in the silence of our hearts.
The expectant Virgin Mary imagines the child growing in her. She is not surprised when the day of birth arrives. On that day, she joyfully receives the one she learned to know during her waiting. And thus, Jesus is born into our lives also, coming slowly and steadily. We receive him as the one we learned to know while waiting. We rejoice to see the face with which we have quietly become familiar.
Source: http://www.allsaintspress.com/ASP/18-351.pdf. Jesus the Coming One: Through Advent with Pope Francis and Henri J. M. Nouwen, ed. Steve Mueller.
