ADVENT 1: Tuesday: We Are Pregnant Together With Mary

Statue of the Visitation at Church of the Visitation in Ein Karem, Israel, source: Deror avi

<We have waited in silence on your loving-kindness, O God.—Psalms 48:8>

<Most of the time, we hurry and we push. We split time into tenths of seconds. We fret when a traffic light turns red or we miss a train. The press of hurrying creates harried and hassled souls, disconnected from Spirit and from the gift of kindness itself. "Waiting in hope" is an attitude of faith, of trust, of joyful expectation. Waiting with a quiet spirit, creating space for absolute trust that we are exactly where we are supposed to be, may be the most essential practice for followers of the Christ. It is in many ways the spirit of Advent, that time of year when we practice the waiting of gestation, hoping, of trusting in new life not yet fully known. Thomas Merton remarked that life is a perpetual Advent, a continuous contemplation: <Let us become more humble than the rocks, More wakeful than the patient hills.> He sensed that in that waiting, trust begins to grow. Trust in God who is beyond all that is created and is the source of all things, seen and unseen. Trust that God is now among us and will come again among us in a rich and meaningful way at the end of our waiting. Trusting and waiting allows the loving-kindness that is the essence of God’s own Life to grow in us, and to bear fruit that we never expected.>

<Grant me O God the capacity to wait in hope,
to allow your own loving-kindness to grow in me,
for the life of your world. > 

- Mary C. Earle, sort of