A people can grow weary after waiting that long. A people can lose heart, miss the way. A people can despair. A world shrouded in darkness can make a people forget what light ever looked like, can make them wonder if there ever was a light at all. And waiting can go on until it becomes a way of life, until it becomes tradition, until it is no longer waiting at all.
It is forgetting.
A people who have forgotten what God sounds like no longer wait for him. They live in fear of themselves, of each other, of the past and the future, and they cannot wait because waiting feels like doing nothing. "When we are afraid, we want to get away from where we are."*
But there is a small remnant of those who still wait. There is a promise they cling to. "They have received something that is at work in them, like a seed that has started to grow . . . We can only really wait if what we are waiting for has already begun for us. It is always a movement from something to something more."*
History may have recorded four hundred years of silence, but these hearts did not. They heard God. And in the darkness they were waiting, not passively, but in the moment, present in the belief that God was near.
He had already come. And so they were ready. Zechariah, Elizabeth, Mary, Simeon, Anna . . . they were watching for the light because it shone already in their hearts.
Advent: expectant waiting and preparation for the coming of Christ.
We mark his coming more like a forgetting than a remembering. We fill up our darkness with all kinds of noisy celebration, but I wonder if we are really waiting for him.
He's coming, you know. His coming has begun in us. There are tendrils uncurling in the darkness, seedlings reaching for the light. Will we be ready to receive him?
* Henri Nouwen, "Waiting for God." From Watch for the Light, Orbis, 2011
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