Sister Elise Saggau, OSF
Christmas is traditionally the time for gift-giving. This is because it is at the original Christmas we received the greatest gift ever given. “God so loved the world that God gave the only Son” (John 3:16). Deeply related to this receiving is our receiving our own lives as creatures—a great challenge for us. In a way, we have to learn how to receive our lives. While God is the source of our being, we must learn to yearn for God. And while we are learning that, we are learning something else. Life itself teaches us that, in a certain sense, we cannot ever actually “have” God. This is our basic human condition.
It is difficult for us to endure not having God. But, in fact, how could that ever be? God is not just one “thing” among other “things”. We might actually believe that we know and understand God. We might imagine we know how God thinks and how God acts. But in reality, how could we really know God when we can’t even really know another human person, when we can’t even really know ourselves? Don’t we even now continually make new discoveries about ourselves as the years go by? Have we not surprised ourselves over the years by coming up with a new idea or demonstrating a new ability that we didn’t even know we had? And is not the other person always a fundamental mystery? Don’t the people you know and love keep surprising you? The truth is, we always have to wait for a human being, even ourselves. We must wait and see. If this is true for us, how much more this is true as we try to know and understand God, who is infinitely hidden and infinitely free.
We really cannot figure God out because God is Mystery. God is the One whom we must always continue to seek, for whom we must always wait. God is the one whom we continually receive, and yet whom we can never totally grasp. And that is what Advent is all about. It reminds us who we are and who God is. During Advent, we consciously embrace the position of waiting, knowing that God is always and forever on the way.
The Church assists us and guides us on this perpetual journey into God. The Church waits with us. Each year it sets aside four weeks before the amazing event of Christmas to keep us focused on who we are and who God is. It places before us those aspects of the Holy Scriptures that reveal to us how human beings have been, from time immemorial, celebrating the coming of God into their lives. The Church assures us that we are not alone, that our lives have meaning and purpose.
And so we wait. We wait and expect, not as individuals alone and afraid, but as a community of believers. We wait together. We manifest together that God is not only coming, but has already come. We witness to the fact that God is here now, in our midst—always accessible to us. We show to each other and to the greater world what it means to live in faith, trust, and love in this time and in this place. And we assure one another that we are still on the way together to something as yet undreamed of. Come, Lord Jesus!
