First Week of Advent: What I Learned About Advent Anticipation in Meeting Mark

With the Christmas season in full-swing in the secular realm and record commercial sales being posted, it can be so very easy to overlook the fact that we are actually in the thick of the Advent season. The word itself is from the latin adventus, which means "coming". Wikipedia has it quite right by saying that the Advent Season is one of "expectant waiting." This implies an "active" mode of the hopeful anticipation of encounter rather than the more "passive" act of waiting to see what is wrapped under the Christmas tree. With regard to the waiting that is characteristic of the Advent Season, Henri Nouwen describes it in these words: "Waiting, as we see it in the people on the first pages of the Gospel, is waiting with a sense of promise: 'Zechariah...your wife Elizabeth is to bear you a son.'.... 'Mary,....Listen! You are to conceive and bear a son'. (Luke 1:13, 31). People who wait have received a promise that allows them to wait. They have received something that is at work in them, like a seed that has started to grow. This is very important. We can only really wait if what we are waiting for has already begun in us. So waiting is never a movement from nothing to something. It is always a movement from something to something more."


I learned a profound lesson about the spirit of Advent Anticipation in meeting Mark. I met Mark on a recent trip to the VA Medical Center in St. Cloud, MN. I went there to attend the care conference of a client under guardianship. I arrived with the "lowest common denominator" expectation of simply attending the care conference and then meeting with three other clients in residence there. I didn't anticipate or expect anything special or out of the ordinary. I had been down this road several times already and must say that I had a bit of "tunnel vision" in focusing solely on my reason for being there (rather than God's reason for my being there!) When I walked into the room where the conference was going to be, I encountered a diminutive, slightly older than middle-aged man sitting by himself. He had thick glasses on that made his eyes as big as coffee saucers and was quietly and contentedly sipping coffee. I wondered what he was doing in the room all by himself. I introduced myself and told him my reason for being in the room. At that he said that he should probably leave. I told him he could stay since the conference wouldn't begin for about ten minutes.


At the invitation to stay we began to share a little bit about ourselves. I found out from him that, in addition to being a veteran, he had earned his PhD in history. He also had a number of children and a loving wife with whom he had recently spent the Thanksgiving holiday. After sharing my theological educational and vocational background, we began talking about faith. He surprised me by saying that it was his conviction that we didn't end up in the same room as a happenstance, but, rather, that God gave us this time, and this space, to share with one another in order to encounter the living God who delights in surprising us at a moment's notice. I found in Mark what Advent Anticipation is all about. Here was a man who was not at all alone in the early morning light of the conference room. Rather, he was there with the seed of God growing within him, being nurtured by his recent experience of Thanksgiving and his total life experience. Mark was kind enough to share that seed with me and to remind me of the divine seed that I hope is growing within me and that will grow within all of us this Advent Season.