“You could more easily catch a hurricane in a shrimp net that you can understand the wild, relentless, passionate, uncompromising, pursuing love of God made present in the manger.”– Brennan Manning
As a child, I always loved helping to set up the crèche. Advent was a predictable four-week season of lighting the Advent wreath, preparing our home and hearts, and counting down the days to Christmas. My daughter Emma also loved to set up our crèche each year. As an only child, she carefully placed each figure with no worries of a sibling “messing it up.”
Covid-19 has given us a new perspective on what is most essential in our lives. The pandemic has also given us a deeper understanding of Advent. These past two years we have been in a place of transition, waiting and not knowing. We anticipate the time when we can come out of confinement, hoping for future travel adventures, eager to see loved ones and give them a hug, anxious for news about vaccinations, and apprehensive that new variants could return us to lockdown again. In this time of abiding uncertainty, bless all who wait. As the poet Ann Weems has written … “God will be born in a place we can’t imagine and won’t believe.”
It Is Not Over
It is not over,
this birthing.
There are always newer skies
into which
God can throw stars.
When we begin to think
that we can predict the Advent of God,
that we can box the Christ in a stable in Bethlehem,
that’s just the time
that God will be born
in a place we can’t imagine and won’t believe.
Those who wait for God
watch with their hearts and not their eyes,
listening
always listening
for angel words.
-Ann Weems