As Brer Bruce James reminded us last week, it’s been a tough year for waiting. We’ve been waiting for lockdowns to end; fires to be extinguished; losses to be grieved; vaccines to be developed; social and ecological justice to be established and embodied; campaigns to be made and votes to be counted; and so much more. The pandemic, in particular, not only brought our attention to a new problem; it intensified the disparities that were already there.
So, whether you have spent most of 2020 isolated, struggling with loneliness and longing for human connection, or whether you have spent the year near or on the front lines, facing constant risk and too often witnessing deep suffering, we have all been waiting. For me, personally, this has also been a very difficult year. As the Psalmist taught us to pray, “How long?”
And yet.
This week’s liturgical readings are a treasure trove, including some of our most beloved passages: “Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God”; “Get you up to a high mountain”; “he will gather the lambs in his arms”; “Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet”; “regard the patience of our Lord as salvation”; “I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals.”
But I keep coming back to the familiar start of the gospel reading for today, and it’s become a prayer and a mantra for me:
“The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”
I’ve always found it wondrous that the good news of Jesus begins with John, but it wasn’t just John. The good news began as the people got ready, as the way was prepared. And so I have been asking myself: what have we been preparing? What valleys have we been lifting up, and what mountains have we been leveling?
For as long as I can remember, I’ve received those words as a call to radical compassion and non-hierarchichal relationships. And, despite the suffering of this year, I’ve seen a lot of us coming together to make those “rough places a plain,” of naming and transforming oppression and coercion, and making our individual and collective well-being the measure of community instead.
So I’m exhausted, and I suspect you are, too. But the Spirit has been leading us through this wilderness, and our faithfulness makes new things possible.
Advent is a good time to catch our breath and re-evaluate, to look and listen deeply. When we do, we find that the waiting has also been preparing, joining our voices and actions to those of John and all those who went to him in the wilderness. We are crying out together! And, as we listen to one another, we learn more and more how to love and live like Jesus. Like Francis and Clare. Like the great cloud of witnesses. Like a community of ragtag ecumenical Franciscans.
Listen again! All our voices swell together in one great chorus, and here is the refrain:
“The beginning [again and again!] of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”
I’m grateful for each of you, our little community, and the opportunity to be part of announcing, each day, “the beginning of the good news” in our life and words.
Many prayers, and much love,
Jacoba Pronouns: (they/them