We enter once again into the Advent Season, a time of great anticipation and joy. The word, Advent, comes to us from the Latin word for coming, or adventus. What we are focused on during Advent, of course, is the coming of Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of God. In relation to the coming of Christ, the Church teaches us the importance of glancing backward, as well as looking ahead.
We glance backward in awe and wonder at the God who became man to save us from our sins. Our readings are often messianic and fill us with that excitement that God intended when He sent Christ into this world as a child born in Bethlehem. Isaiah's cry this morning leaves us breathless:
Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down, with the mountains quaking before you, while you wrought awesome deeds we could not hope for, such as they have not heard of from of old.
—Isaiah 64:1-4
At the same time, Advent is not only about glancing back in some nostalgic way at the coming of Jesus. It is a time of preparation for the Second Coming, when Christ will come at the end of time (or at the end of our lives). That is why, in the Gospel for this morning, we find not the child Jesus in Bethlehem but Christ in front of the temple, exhorting us four times to watch, to be vigilant, and to be ready for Him when he comes again:
Be watchful! Be alert! You do not know when the time will come … What I say to you, I say to all: ‘Watch!’
—Mark 13:33, 37
Every year we are given St. John the Baptist as a guide in the Advent Season. He comes up in two out of the four Sunday Gospel readings (next week and the week after). But I would suggest that, even more than St. John the Baptist, the person who teaches us most about what it means to glance back in wonder and look ahead in faith for the coming of Christ is the Blessed Virgin Mary. Mary has much that she can teach us this Advent.
Firstly, Mary teaches us about waiting and watching for Christ under her title, Our Lady of Hope. We are living in a time that is desperate for hope, especially in the midst of the global pandemic and all its consequences for our daily lives and our future. Interestingly, when the great scholars of the Church write about hope as a theological virtue, they understand it as something rooted and grounded in the past.
They mention the three faculties of the soul: intellect, memory and will. The intellect is associated with faith (think of St. Anselm’s fides quearens intellectum and how faith helps to illumine the intellect and allows us to know God more deeply), while the will is commonly associated with the theological virtue of love (the more I will the good of the other, the more I exercise my love for that person). But hope is associated with the memory. We remember how faithful God has been in the history of Israel; we recall his fidelity through many centuries of the Church’s life; we can see, in our own personal histories, the tremendous faithfulness of God. God has always provided, has always loved us; He has always forgiven and cared for us. That memory inspires us to hope and to look forward with the same certainty that He will be there for us in the days to come.
The Blessed Virgin Mary beautifully expresses this theological virtue when she sings her Maginficat in St. Luke’s Gospel. In that magnificent song of praise, Mary is glancing back at the Old Testament (specifically, the First Book of Samuel, and also the fidelity of God through the centuries). She incorporates that song of praise in a new way to express her great hope in what God is doing and will continue to do in the days ahead. Mary teaches us, this Advent, how to glance back with wonder, and look forward in hope for the coming of Christ.
Secondly, the Blessed Virgin Mary teaches us humility. Without humility we will never see God, nor be ready to receive Him as we should. The saints reveal to us that humility is the foundation for prayer and the spiritual life. St. Teresa of Avila, writing to her sisters, uses the analogy of chess to make this point. She says:
Now realize that anyone who doesn’t know how to set up the pieces for a game of chess won’t know how to play well. And without knowing how to check the king, one won’t know how to checkmate it either . . . The queen is the piece that can carry on the best battle in this game, and all the other pieces help. There’s no queen like humility for making the king surrender. Humility drew the King from heaven to the womb of the virgin, and with it…we will draw him to our souls.
—St. Teresa of Avila, The Way of Perfection, Ch. 16, #1-2
Our Lady drew the king from heaven into her womb and can teach us all about how to live in humility of life. Humility is simply the acknowledgement of the truth about ourselves, nothing more and nothing less. In her Magnificat, Mary sings, “For behold, henceforth all generations will call me blessed” (Luke 1:48). For anyone else to say that would be arrogance, but with Mary it is perfect humility because it is true. When we look at our lives, we see only what the Lord has given us and entrusted to us, and we do not seek to go beyond that. We do not look to the work or life that someone else has, or consider ourselves to be something that we are not. With the humility of Mary, we can draw God more completely into our souls this Advent.
Finally, Mary teaches us about waiting and watching for Christ when we meditate on the word, “hic.” Hic is the latin word for “here,” and if you have every been to the Holy Land then you know where I am going with this already! That word is inscribed in many of the holy places that mark the significant moments in Jesus’ life. Mary is also an intimate part of those moments.
In the Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth, in the place where the Blessed Virgin Mary said, "Yes," to God, there is an inscription that says, "Hic Verbum caro factum est," Here the Word was made flesh! At Bethlehem, it is announced that hic the Christ was born of the Virgin. It is hic, in Cana of Galilee, that Christ performed His first miracle, and the Blessed Virgin Mary was deeply involved in that amazing event. Mary knows how to find Christ in the present moment, and she longs to intercede for us so that we will not miss Him in the hic et nunc (here and now).
St. Bernard of Clairvaux, in his own meditation on Advent, indicates that hic is the third Advent, which runs between the other two. He speaks of Christ’s first coming, as a child in Bethlehem, and the Second Coming, at the end of time. But he says that Christ is constantly coming into our lives in a hidden way, and this way is like the road that runs between the other two. The Blessed Virgin Mary teaches us how to find Jesus on that road, and helps us to encounter Him hic. Jesus is coming to us here, now, in the Blessed Sacrament of the Eucharist, and will come to us in many different ways when we make room for Him and anticipate that awesome gift of His presence.
In these next four weeks, we ask for the grace to learn from Mary to be people of hope, growing in humility, and aware of the presence of Christ in each of the moments of our lives. May we truly be watchful and waiting for the coming of Christ this Advent.
