When the quiet joy of the period before Christmas makes itself felt on every side, many factors can make it especially hard to be sick. The burden of sickness prevents us from truly sharing in the joy others feel. But perhaps Advent can nevertheless become a medicine of the soul that makes it easier to bear the enforced inaction and the pain of your illness. Indeed, perhaps Advent can help us discover the unobtrusive grace that can lie in the very fact of being sick.
A very personal Advent of one’s own
Let us reflect on what the word “Advent” actually means. The Latin word adventus can be translated as “presence” or “arrival”. In the vocabulary of classical antiquity, it was a technical term for the arrival of a high official and especially for the arrival of kings or emperors in a province. It could, however, also express the arrival of a deity who emerged from hiddenness and gave proof of his presence through mighty works or of a god whose presence was solemnly celebrated in a cultic act.
The Christians adopted this word in order to express their special relationship to Jesus Christ. For Christians, he was the king who had entered this wretched province Earth and bestowed on it the gift of his visit; and they believed that he was present in the liturgical assembly. In general terms, when they used this word, they intended to say: God is here. He has not withdrawn from the world. He has not left us alone. Although we cannot see him and take hold of him as we do with objects in this world, nevertheless he is here, and he comes to us in many ways.
Accordingly, the word visitatio is closely connected to the meaning of the word “Advent”. This means “visit”, but our ecclesiastical language has long been accustomed to translate it as “visitation”. And a strange shift in our thinking has occurred here: the word “visitation” has almost completely lost the joyful contents of the word “visit”. We no longer think of its original meaning; rather, we think of “visitations” as burdens and labors that we interpret as a punishment “visited upon us” by God. But the opposite ought in fact to be the case! The word “visitation” (or “visit”) ought to help us perceive that even hard things may contain something of the beauty of Advent.
Just like a great joy, so too illness and suffering can be a very personal Advent of one’s own – a visit by the God who enters my life and wants to encounter me personally. Even when it is difficult for us, we should at least try to understand the days of our illness in this way: The Lord has interrupted my activity for a time in order to let me be still.
In my daily living, I have little time for him and little time for myself. I am completely involved from morning to evening in all the things I have to do, and I even succeed in eluding my own grasp, because I do not know how to be alone with myself. My job possesses me; the society in which I live possesses me; entertainment of various kinds possesses me; but I do not possess myself. And this means that I gradually go to seed like an overgrown garden, first in my external activities and, then, in my inner life, too. I am propelled along by my activities, for I am merely a cog in their great machinery.
But now God has drawn me out of all this. I am obliged to be still. I am obliged to wait. I am obliged to reflect on myself; I am obliged to bear being alone. I am obliged to bear pain, and I am obliged to accept the burden of my own self. All this is hard.
But may it not be the case that God is waiting for me in this stillness? May it not be the case that he is doing here what Jesus says in the parable of the vine: “Every branch that does bear fruit he prunes, that it may bear more fruit” (Jn 15:2)?
If I learn to accept myself in these days of stillness, if I accept the pain, because the Lord is using it to purify me – does this not make me richer than if I had earned a lot of money? Has not something happened to me that is more durable and fruitful than all those things that can be counted and calculated?
A visit by the Lord – perhaps illness can present itself in a new light when we see it as a part of Advent. For when we rebel against it, this is not only because it is painful or because it is hard to be still and alone: we rebel against it because there are so many important things we ought to be doing and because illness seems meaningless. But it is not in the least meaningless! In the structure of human life as a whole, it is profoundly meaningful. It can be a moment in our life that belongs to God, a time when we are open to him and thus learn to rediscover our own selves.
Perhaps we should try an experiment. Let us understand the individual events of the day as little signs God sends us. Let us not take note only of the annoying and unpleasant things; we should endeavor to see how often God lets us feel something of his love. To keep a kind of inner diary of good things would be a beautiful and healing task.
The Lord is here. This Christian certainty is meant to help us look at the world with new eyes and to understand the “visitation” as a visit, as one way in which he can come to us and be close to us.
Paths and forms of waiting
A second basic element of Advent is waiting – a waiting that is an act of hope. Advent thus shows us the very essence of Christian time and the true nature of history. Jesus revealed this in many parables: in the story of the servants who are waiting for the return of their master or of those other servants who forget his return and behave as if they were the proprietors; in the story of the virgins who await the bridegroom or of those other virgins who cannot wait for him; and in the parables of sowing and harvest.
In his life here on earth, man is one who waits. As a child, he wants to be an adult; as an adult, he wants to forge ahead and be successful; and finally, he yearns for rest. At last, there comes the time when he realizes that he has hoped for too little: he has set his hopes on a job and a good position, but now he has nothing else left for which to hope.
Mankind has never ceased to hope for better times; Christians hope that the Lord passes through the whole of history and that he will one day gather up all our tears and labors, so that everything will find its explanation and its fulfillment inhis kingdom.
Nothing shows more clearly than a period of illness that man is one who waits. Every day, we wait for signs of improvement, and ultimately we wait for a complete recovery. At the same time, however, we discover that there are very different forms of waiting.
When the time is not filled with a meaningful presence, waiting becomes unbearable. When the present moment remains completely empty – when all we can do is to look for something to come, and there is nothing at all in the here and now every second is too long. And waiting is an intolerable burden when it remains completely uncertain whether we actually dare expect anything.
But when time itself is meaningful and each moment contains something valuable of its own, the joyful anticipation of something greater, some thing still to come, makes even more precious that which we already experience. And it gives us a kind of invisible force that bears us across the individual moments. The Christian Advent wants to help us attain this kind of waiting, for this is the truly Christian form of waiting and hoping.
This is because the gifts of Jesus Christ do not belong purely to the future: they penetrate the present time, too. He is already present in a hidden manner. He speaks to me in many ways – through Sacred Scripture, through the Church year, through the saints, through many different events in my daily life, and through the whole of creation, which looks different when he stands behind it than when it is obscured by the mist of an uncertain origin and an uncertain future. I can speak to him; I can utter lamentations in his presence; and I can hold up my sufferings, my impatience, and my questions to him, aware that he always hears me.
If God exists, then there is no meaningless time, no time devoid of significance. Every moment has its value, even if all I can do is to endure my illness in silence. If God exists, then there is always something to hope for, even where no human voice can any longer summon me to hope. And old age and retirement are no longer the last stage of my life, a position from which all I can do is look backward: for something greater always lies ahead, and it is precisely the time of an apparent uselessness that can be the highest form of human ripening.
Christian hope does not devalue time. On the contrary, it means that every moment of life possesses its own value; it means that we can accept the present and that we ought to live it to the full, because everything we have accepted in our heart will remain.
A time of joy that no suffering can drive away
This helps us to understand a third aspect of Advent. It is not only the time of the presence and the awaiting of the Eternal God; since it is both of these, it is in a unique manner also a time of joy, a joy that dwells within us and cannot be driven away by suffering.
Perhaps the easiest way to understand this is to look at the inner meaning of our Advent customs. Almost all of these are rooted in passages of Scripture that the Church employs in this time as words of her prayer. Here, the faithful people have, as it were, translated Scripture into visible signs.
For example, we read in Psalm 96: “Then shall all the trees of the wood sing for joy before the LORD, for he comes.” The liturgy has expanded this, drawing on other texts in the Psalms, to form the following affirmation: “The mountains and hills will sing praise before God, and all the trees of the wood will clap their hands, for the Lord, the ruler, is coming to rule for ever.”
The Christmas trees we decorate are simply an attempt to make these words visible. The Lord is here – our ancestors believed this and knew this, and so the trees had to go out to meet him, they had to bow down before him, the trees themselves had to become a song of praise to their Lord. The same certainty of faith led them to make the words about the singing mountains and hills a reality. They gave a voice to the mountains, and their singing resounds down through the centuries into our own days, letting us sense something of the nearness of the Lord – for it is only he who could give men such melodies.
Even a custom like Christmas baking, apparently such an external activity, has its roots in the Church’s Advent liturgy, which makes its own the glorious words of the Old Testament in these days of the declining year: “In that day, the mountains will drip sweetness, and the rivers will flow with milk and honey.” People of old found in such words the embodiment of their hopes for a world redeemed. And once again, our ancestors celebrated Christmas as the day on which God truly came. When he comes at Christmas, he distributes his honey (so to speak). Truly, the earth must flow with this honey on that day: where he is present, all bitterness disappears, and there is harmony between heaven and earth, between God and man. The honey and the sweets are a sign of this peace, of concord and of joy.
This is why Christmas has become the feast when we give presents, when we imitate the God who has given his own self and has thereby given us once again that life which truly becomes a gift only when the “milk” of our existence is sweetened by the “honey” of being loved. And this love is not threatened by any death, any infidelity, or any meaninglessness.
Ultimately, all this finds its unity in the joy that God has become a child who encourages us to trust as children trust and to give and receive gifts.
It may be difficult for us to accept this joyful music when we are tormented by questions, when we are afflicted both by bodily illness and psychological problems, and these would tend to make us rebel against the God whom we cannot understand. But this child is a sign of hope precisely for those who are oppressed. And this is why he has awakened an echo so pure that its consoling power can touch the hearts even of unbelievers.
Perhaps the right way to celebrate Advent is to let the signs of God’s love that we receive in this period penetrate our soul, without resistance, without questions and quibbling. Warmed by these signs, we can then receive in full confidence the immeasurable kindness of this child who alone had the power to make the mountains sing and to transform the trees of the wood into a praise of God.
This meditation was written during Cardinal Ratzinger’s time as Archbishop of Munich.