I was going to write a post called "The Time Traveler's Strife," because the experience of synchronizing my own internal calendar, which told me ten days ago that Christmas was still five weeks in the future, with the punishing and implacable external calendar -- well, it wasn't pretty. I felt like Harry Potter in the Floo Network as I came to a juddering halt on the morning of Dec. 23, coughing up ash and confused as to my whereabouts. Or perhaps that should be my whenabouts.
Friday stunk. But Saturday did not stink at all -- the weekend was, in fact, memorably unstinky. Fragrant, even.
There was lots to do, of course: wrapping and cooking and sticking pictures into scrapbooks and vigorous ignoring of the laundry Himalayas. (We've moved beyond a laundry mountain; now it's a laundry range.)
But all day long on Saturday a sense of sacred expectancy nudged at me, a whisper of yearning and of fulfillment close at hand. It was an invitation to let my preparations be an act of welcome and not a forced march. It happened quietly, and I could choose to ignore it. But it happened again and again, and I could also choose to listen, and to temper my haste with eagerness.
I was praying the rosary aloud on the couch and the weight of the Incarnation was brought home to me -- with my voice I can honor God; with my hands (cleaning up exploding diarrhea and consoling the boy whose favorite Christmas gift, his Batman pajamas, must go in the wash), I can give glory to the King. Because God entered the world with a body and redeemed it by his body, the work of our own bodies can be redemptive.
Saturday I was washing dishes and reflecting on the resurrection. I don't have to think very long about God's existence outside space and time before my head starts to spin, but in that moment the message was simple: God has it all covered. We celebrate a baby, the Alpha and Omega. A baby, called Faithful and True. A baby, with the keys of death and hell: alleluia.
When I was 22 I was praying one night and trying to imagine what God enthroned might look like. And as I prayed I saw in my mind's eye a great tearing -- the scene I had imagined seemed suddenly frozen, artificial, and as it was ripped away I caught a glimpse of something much vaster, something resplendent with glory. I think the Christian life is a series of similar rendings: moments when you realize how much more tremendous God is, how much more majestic, than you ever guessed.
Sometimes Christmas celebrations are sticky with treacly sentimentality -- perhaps it's because "awww" is more familiar than awe. It's easy to sing piously "be born in us today" without remembering to be careful what you pray for because you might get it. "Be born in me" -- let me work harder than I ever knew I could for you, stretch me beyond what I think I can bear for you, push me to my uttermost that I may gaze at you, afterward, with love and wonder. The work of bearing my children is written on my bones; after I am dead a forensic anthropologist studying my skeleton will be able to say, "This woman was a mother." Let my God write his Name into the core of me as well: be born in me, Lord; be born in me.
I was surprised, as a convert, to see the eschatological elements of a Catholic Advent. We say not, "How sweet that he came," but "How awe-some," in the true sense of the word. How awesome, again, that he returns. Grant me, O God, a holy impatience that tugs at me amid the quotidian. Let me see beyond the packages and the potato-peeling. In this season give me a heart that calls out: Even so, come, Lord Jesus.
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