A World of Watchful Anticipation

            Then there’s me.  I did not like being pregnant, not one bit.  To be clear, I loved THAT I was pregnant.  I loved that I was becoming a mother and that in a matter of months I would get to meet face to face the tiny human I had already begun falling in love with the day I got six positives on six different home pregnancy tests . . . just to make sure. 

            But I did not love the physical experience of being pregnant.  The nausea, aching back, swollen ankles, stretch marks, and indescribable fatigue were no fun.  By the fourth month, I could no longer wear my gold wedding and engagement rings because chemical changes in my body cause them to blister my skin.  Nineteen years later, I still can’t wear gold.  I did not enjoy feeling hungry all the time or having to get up to go to the bathroom during the night too many times to count.  I missed the occasional glass of Chardonnay.  I cried the first day I looked down and could no longer see my feet.  Truth be told, I cried a lot of days for no reason at all.

Getting Ready

I did not, however, let the Negative Nancy in me keep me from being prepared.  I read all the books about having a healthy pregnancy, being a good mother, and not hating your husband who experiences the same joyful anticipation but can also drink wine and see his feet.  I bought all the “baby stuff” in duplicate just in case I lost the diaper bag at the zoo or we left the bouncy chair at Grandmas. 

At one point in my eighth month, I found myself at the counter of a CVS purchasing baby shampoo in quantities that would have kept an entire village of infants clean and soapy for three years.  As I swiped my credit card at the check-out, I realized what I was doing.  For the eight months up to that point, I had been preparing for some sort of maternal Armageddon.  I guess I was operating under the notion that once the baby arrived, nothing about life as I had known it would be the same.  I was right about that.  And wrong too.  Life was never the same, but I was able to return to the routines of a person not preparing for 18 years in a fallout shelter.           

Even though the nine months of pregnancy felt like nine years to me, I will say that in my clearer moments during that time – both of them – I did find a sense of joy in the anticipation.  Will we have a boy or a girl (boy)?  Will he like baseball and golf like his dad (no) and reading and writing like his mom (yes)?  Will he have a sense of humor (yes)?  Will he keep his room clean (no)?  Will he grow up to be an astronaut, attorney, accountant, air traffic controller, actor, artist?  And that’s just the “a’s.”  Anticipation is heady stuff.

Advent Beginnings

The Gospel readings at the beginning of Advent are about being prepared for what is to come.  It’s about being “awake,” being ready, not getting caught off guard.  The reading from Matthew proclaims, “Keep awake, therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming” (24: 42).  Mark’s version is a little more apocryphal.  “But in those days, after that suffering, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken” (13: 24-25).  Luke has roughly the same message but delivers it with extra doses of gloom and doom.  “Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and that day catch you unexpectedly, like a trap” (21: 34-35).

Although Mark is a too dramatic and Luke too depressing for my taste, the message in all three is the same:  Be awake.  Get ready.  Stay alert.  They all tell us that something is coming, something will soon arrive.  And when it does, the last thing we want is to be stuck without the diaper bag or baby shampoo.  The message is clear – whatever it is that’s ready to make its entrance is so amazingly incredible, so spectacularly life-changing, that to miss out on it is simply unthinkable. 

It takes no great leap of faith to believe that there is something powerful, sacred even, in the act of watchful anticipation.  This kind of hopeful preparation is built into the fabric of the universe.  Stars explode and atoms are born and after billions of years become the molecules that pulse through our veins today.  Egg and sperm unite and after nine months become a living, breathing human life.  The blooms are lost in winter as the leaves wither and die. In the turning of seasons, the green of young shoots and color of blooms usher in a celebration of new life during spring.  I have no trouble believing in the power and importance of preparing for some future fulfillment of a deep longing because the world in which I live has this very process built right in.

Longing For and Already Present

Sure, Advent is a season, but it’s also a way of living every day.  The world didn’t wait just once for Jesus’ arrival two thousand years ago – period, end of story.  Then all humanity just got back to our day jobs and bridge groups and dinner reservations.  What Jesus ushered in wasn’t a one-and-done experience.  No, the transformation that people experienced in Jesus was larger, more dynamic, more profound than something that can be contained in a one-time event that involved just 33 years of a 14-billion-year-old story.  The waiting continues because that for which we wait continues to arrive. 

How do I know this?  Our lives are charged with longing and anticipation – for the return of a loved one, the end to suffering, the chance to start over, the sunrise that arrives tomorrow to invite us into a new day.  Waiting is a sacred part of our DNA.  Watchful preparation is the only logical response.  Something is continually arriving, and we must do whatever it takes to make sure we’re home when it shows up on our doorstep. We must be awake, get ready, stay alert.  We must be present to welcome it in. 

Photo by Juan Encalada on Unsplash