Advent is a time of waiting.
We wait for birth, for love, for life itself to reveal its meaning and purpose.
We wait for the seed to spring into growth and then wait for the harvest.
Those who were sick or who tossed all night in fretful sleep waited patiently for this morning’s dawn.
The mother waits for her wandering child to come home.
Most of what is worthwhile in life takes time.
It’s a long way from Derry to Nazareth and it’s a long time since a young woman there called Mary first came to realize that her child was the long promised Messiah.
The news of pregnancy brings with it a conflict of emotions.
It can bring shock and sorrow to some and to others humility, joy and thanksgiving, for every mother knows that her lifestyle for the best part of a year will be dictated by her child.
Beginning perhaps with morning nausea then followed by breathless days and heavy steps, a mother comes to realize that she is totally responsible for the life of a human being.
Never again will she and her child be so totally at one.
A few minutes after birth others can begin the nurturing of her child to maturity, but for now there is no one capable of giving life but herself.
And so it was in Nazareth.
The child of Mary had been described by Gabriel in language ordinarily used for God’s redeeming presence among his people.
She would later ponder over and over some of the angel’s words as she walked the dusty roads of Galilee but for now the new life stirring in her womb brought forth thoughts of deep intimacy and humility.
When she said ‘yes- let it be’ to the wish of God in such a strange request there and then there was a new heaven and a new earth.
The medieval theologian Duns Scotus, beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1993, says that all had changed, a new Spirit entered the world – light, love, wisdom and joy came to the heart and mind of man, and in the sight of God a new springtime woke in the world.
The prophets had been telling about his coming.
Men waited for generations for the day.
Now when it happened it seemed as if God’s becoming man and being born of a woman were just so ordinary and uneventful and the loudest telling of his arrival on earth would be a whisper - the heartbeat within the heartbeat of a young woman inexperienced in child bearing.
Yes, it was all so ordinary and unremarkable.
She had nothing to give him but herself.
From her humanity, she gave him his humanity.
Every heartbeat of hers gave him a heart to love with.
Breaking and eating bread with Joseph, drinking the local wine, she gave him flesh and blood.
Walking the long ninety miles from Nazareth to Ein Karem to see her cousin Elizabeth, she set her feet - and his - on the dusty road to Jerusalem, a woman wrapped in silence…(to be continued).
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