Advent is an opportunity to prepare our hearts for Christ’s coming

By Tish O’Hagan

Diocese of Boise, Director of Worship

I’ve written a lot about Advent for the Register over the years, some of it more liturgy-based, nuts-and-bolts factual and some of it more esoteric.

The feasts, the Propers for the Mass and the Hours, and the environment of the season are gifts to us of the liturgical calendar. They help us, if we are attentive, to open our hearts to the coming of Christ, the commemoration of His birth at Christmas and His coming at the end of time.

This year, in preparation for Advent, I’d like to write about—and invite ICR readers to think about—a way of perceiving the Christ who has already come and is coming, using a line from a poem called “Nativity,” by the poet Li-Young Lee.

Lee was born in Indonesia of Chinese parents. His father was a passionate Christian minister during the reign of Mao Zedong. Lee’s family fled China, then Indonesia, to escape persecution. Once in the United States, Lee became an American and a celebrated poet, his poetic vision broadened by his experience as an immigrant and by his Christian background.

“Nativity” is a beautiful poem, and I encourage everyone to look it up and read it. For this piece, I’m only quoting the last line: “out of what little earth and duration/out of what immense goodbye/each must make a safe place of his heart/before so strange and wild a guest/as God approaches.”

In the time of Christ, religious theologians and scholars knew that Christ was coming. They had studied scripture and prophecies and seen that all the signs that foretold his birth were in place. They knew the time of the Messiah was imminent. Indeed Simeon, the blind man who received the child Jesus into the temple, proclaims it: “Now, Master, you may let your servant go in peace, according to your word, for my eyes have seen your salvation, which you prepared in sight of all the peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and glory for your people Israel” (Luke 2:29-32).

And yet, when Jesus did come, the religious elite denied that he was the Messiah they had long been waiting for. Why? Why did a blind man see more clearly than the elect of Israel?

Perhaps it was because then, as now, our vision tends to be clouded and our hearts closed to the one God, if God does not look or behave the way we want or expect. Perhaps it is because, unlike Simeon, the religious leaders of the time were not prepared for an “immense goodbye.”

Simeon’s disability, his age and readiness for his own death, had humbled him to the point that his heart was fully ready to receive the true image of God. He had no fixed image of God; Simeon’s blindness meant that he could not see other than with his heart, and it was with his heart that he saw the Messiah and thanked God for his coming.

Could it be that, like the pharisees, our impulse to make God in our own image is so strong that when he does not conform to that image, we reject him? That in the tameness and timidity of our perception of God, we have hearts that are unprepared to receive him?

In Advent is our opportunity for a humility like Simeon’s. Over the next month, may we try to imagine that the Christ who is coming may not look as expected.

In Advent is our opportunity to prepare our hearts for the entirety of the guest who approaches, and give welcome there.