Some Thoughts on Advent

Hello! Happy Thanksgiving a week late, and happy Advent to you all! It's hard to believe that we are already in the midst of the holiday season. It feels very strange - and sometimes lonely - to be spending my holidays here in Ecuador, to be preparing for Christmas when it's getting hotter and sunnier every day, to hear Spanish carols pouring from cane houses, to be celebrating advent in Spanish at the misa, to be celebrating here with children whose biggest - or perhaps only - gifts might be the etch-a-sketch and sunglasses they just received from their sponsorship program, 'Children International.' Yes, it's incredibly strange. And yet, I am discovering, it is also a beautiful, beautiful blessing.

With Advent beginning last Sunday I've been reflecting on what Advent and Christmas mean here, in this time and this place. And with every day and every reflection I am finding myself more deeply thankful to be spending Advent here, in a world in which the message and reality of Advent and Christmas suddenly seem more raw, more real, more applicable, more possible. I wanted to share a few reflections...

Entering the Advent season here has prompted me to consider that this world of poverty and injustice that I am surrounded by here in Ecuador is a world very similar to that into which Christ was born. Monday night as my community was praying with Luke's annunciation story, I couldn't help but think that one of my young neighbors, sweeping the dirt floors of her small wooden home, might make a very appropriate Mary, and her young son playing on the floor at her feet might then make a very appropriate Christ child. Yes, this world is the same desperate, oppressed world into which Christ was born, a world of poverty and violence and corruption and gross inequalities (all things that also exist in the States but that have reached such proportions here that they can't possibly be hidden or ignored).

I have been considering, too, this idea of waiting, and what it means to wait in solidarity. I am waiting, as we do every Advent, for Christ's coming, but that seems to take on a new significance here. Here I wait with my friends and neighbors, with my students, with the patients at Damien House, and with the beautiful children who make my life here so joyful. Together we pray 'come Lord Jesus,' come into our hearts and our families, come into our communities and our country, enter into our entire world. Come Lord Jesus, we pray, and turn our world upside down. May the last be first and the kings pulled from their thrones and the rich sent away without, as you have promised. Come Lord Jesus and lift up the little ones you loved so much, here in Ecuador where those little ones, the simple and the weak and the poor, fill the streets. Come Lord Jesus I pray, together with my neighbors, and together we wait in hope.

And I know that this is important too, that we not only wait but that we do so in hope. This can be hard, especially here. Many days our world seems incredibly broken, irreparably shattered. It seems hard to conceive that even Christ could put it back together again. Hope is sometimes hard to come by. And yet as I pictured the annunciation the other night I found myself brimming with esperanza. What an incredibly long time, I reflected, the Israelites were waiting for their Messiah. And who could have ever imagined that that Messiah would enter the world in the way that he did, born in a stable, out of wedlock, the son of a carpenter and a young, insignificant girl in Galilee, destined to become the friend of sinners and the champion of the downtrodden and powerless. As Christ's birth, life, and death have shown us, God's time is not our time, nor are his means our means. And as Christmas inevitably comes after Advent, we wait in hope that Christ's world-turned-upside-down must inevitably come as well. This waiting, of course, does not mean idleness or indifference. I firmly believe that Christ's world is slowly breaking into our own, that our own attempts to love and to work for justice and peace help to bring his kingdom slowly into reality. And yet as we struggle through the day by day, when progress is far from apparent, we Christmas is God's present to us, his promise that, as Oscar Romero tells us, love must win out - it is the only thing that can.



And that is where I leave you today, on a thoughtful note. Thank you for reading my ramblings and my thoughts. Whether or not they meant much, this is where my heart is right now. I know I have said nothing of my comings and goings; I suppose that will have to wait until a later email. Know though that I am thinking of each of you, holding you all in my heart! I am thankful for you all :)

A lot, a lot of love is being sent your way from South America -