WHOLLY FAMILY

Are we there yet? Appreciating the Advent, not just the arrival

By Mary Moore | Nov. 19, 2009 | The Catholic Sun

As a child the great highlights of family drives were always their final destination — even when it meant driving to the middle of nowhere to see my dad’s current highway project.

When you are the only girl and the youngest of four, smashed in the back seat of a station wagon with three über-tall brothers whose all-leg composition makes them look something like giant crickets, even a destination like the newest unmarked stretch of the Sun Valley Parkway is a welcome break from the coffin-like atmosphere that preceded it.

In the back of that car, we must have asked often: “Are we there yet?”

I still get it, too, that impatient readiness. Now approaching the last month of a pregnancy, I can feel my nesting instincts kick into high gear, and my patience give way to the all-too-familiar: “Are we there yet?”

I realize I am missing out, in such impatience, on the joy available to me in the waiting. In fact, I am actually cheapening a large part of my personhood, something John Paul II called the “genius” of women.

Though it has never been officially defined, I would sum up the “feminine genius” as a woman’s ability to take something in and by an active submission, allow it to grow into something more beautiful than it was to start with, so that it can ultimately be given away. Be it an idea or a nascent life, women have the unique capability of making the process of a thing beautiful, not just its result.

But the impatience of those of all of us who ask, “Are we there yet?” is also a symptom of homesickness which, when properly embraced, allows us to see Christ in the very advent of the situation.

Embracing the moment

Halfway through a college semester abroad, I called my family from a pay phone in Paris. Following a midnight theft of our personal belongings on a Eurail car, four of my friends and I found ourselves broke, cold, hungry and homesick. And it was just days before Thanksgiving. So we did what any normal 19-year-old Americans would do in such a situation: we pouted to our parents and asked for a little cash.

I whined to my brother on the phone that whether it was my blonde hair and white tennis shoes, or the lack of any kind of command of the French language, I had never felt so unwelcome anywhere. I punctuated the whole sob story with, “I just wish I were home.” He, being one of the aforementioned crickets, was completely unsympathetic. Apparently being homesick in the most romantic and popular city in the world didn’t constitute a pathetic situation for him, and he told me as much before handing the phone to my dad who was only slightly more compassionate.

My dad assured me that the homesickness I was feeling in Paris was really just a human longing for my eternal home in Heaven, now manifest in the streets of a city — which he reminded me — most people live their whole lives without ever having the privilege of seeing. Of course, I tried to counter his bizarrely global treatment of the situation but to no avail.

Beautiful process

I see now, he was right. And I should have really appreciated and embraced the moment like the feminine genius I am supposed to be.

Whether because of my late-blooming “genius” or my European experience, I now enjoy Advent almost more than Christmas day, and pregnancy as much as parenthood. I love being part of the process of something beautiful, even before it arrives. My prayer for my children is that, with each lighting of the Advent candles, they will see that they are part of a most important and beautiful event: recalling God’s gift of His Son, and preparing for the day when He will come again.

--

Mary Moore is a columnist for The Catholic Sun who lives in Mesa. Please send comments to letters@catholicsun.org.