For my Advent devotionals, I am reading Wendy Wright’s The Vigil: Keeping Watch in the Season of Christ’s Coming. I like the way she intertwines her personal story with a deep study of the Scriptures. She writes, “Promise is at the heart of the season of Coming. Opening our hearts to the radical nature of the promise is the initial invitation of the liturgical moment in which we find ourselves. The further invitation is to believe. By belief I do not mean primarily intellectual assent, nor do I mean a sort of blind faith in something we are told we should assent to. To believe something (in a religious sense) is not simply to hold an opinion; it is to let that something sink down into the marrow of your bones and form the structure of your life. To believe something is to let its affirmation become the inhalation and exhalation of your life’s breath. Belief does not exclude doubt or incredulity or intellectual curiosity, but belief is not exhausted in doubting or incredulity or curiosity. To believe something is to let it transform your life” (p. 25-26).

Sitting in meditation, letting these words echo in my mind and heart, I hear a voice ask: “What is the promise you hold on to in your desert? What do you believe, at a bone-marrow-level, that Christ’s advent can transform in your life?” I sit with these questions, quietly paying attention to my breath, until a golden light dawns in my field of vision. The light slowly moves downward throughout my body, warming and relaxing muscles tight with tension. I hear myself answer, “That I can find the courage to open my hands – to loosen my grip on the way life has been, and move into the future, arms open wide.”

Suddenly, I am surrounded by a host of people, each of them eager to claim the promise held out in this Advent season. “Freedom,” an alcoholic says. “Freedom from addiction.”
“Words,” cries an writer struggling with writer’s block. “Something to eat,” whispers a little boy with a bulging belly. A man with life-long anxiety issues speaks up. “Peace,” he says. “A child,” cries a woman in the midst of fertility treatment. “A job,” mutters a man who has been out of work for over a year. A husband and wife on the verge of divorce agree for a change – “An end to the arguing,” they say in one voice. “Restored health,” shouts a man, after living for years with chronic pain.

Advent is the season of waiting. We wait in the dark as we approach the shortest day of the year. We wait for the light of the long-expected promise – the promise that all of creation will be restored, that all things will be made new, that weeping shall be no more. Come, O come, Emmanuel. God with us. Fulfillment of the Promise.

What is the promise you hold on to in your desert? What do you believe, at a bone-marrow-level, that Christ’s advent can transform in your life?

“Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then shall the lame man leap like a hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing for joy. Waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert; the burning sand shall become a pool, and the thirsty ground springs of water…” Isaiah 35: 5-7