O King of all nations and keystone of the Church: come and save us, whom you formed from the dust!

Advent is a word that comes from the Latin advenire: ad (“to” or “at”) + venire (“to come” or “to arrive”).  Liturgically, the season is one of both remembering and anticipating the coming or arrival of Christ, but what if it is also about our own arrival and our own coming?  Augustine came to know and experience God who was “always, already there", a God who was up ahead, leading him on the journey and meeting him in his very reality.  Maybe the season of Advent is about our arrival “at,” our coming “to” the place where God has always been waiting for us. Maybe we are not the ones who are waiting and anticipating fullness.  Maybe it is actually God who has been waiting for us and anticipating our arrival, an arrival that has everything to do with our realization of God’s real, loving Presence always and everywhere: our own coming to be really present to this Real Presence.

Mary had this insight.  She knew this deeply as she carried this Presence in haste to her cousin Elizabeth.  She proclaimed this realization in song so much so that she was magnified and expanded by such an awareness, arriving at the knowledge of what God had intended all along with such Presence: the magnification and expansion of our vision of the world into God’s vision and God’s dream, in which all division ceases, in which all gaps close, in which all is levelled out, is made equal and made one.  This is God’s expansive love embodied and expressed in the person of Jesus who expanded Mary’s vision for herself, the first, as Augustine says, among the disciples. And Jesus wants us to “come to” the awareness that he wants to do the same for us.

A reflection written by Kevin DePrinzio O.S.A., Villanova University, Villanova, Pennsylvania, US

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