Pregnant with Christ

We are more than halfway through Advent, and like everything in my life during this season, it is going all too fast. I long to take my prayer and my tea to a sunlit corner and linger with God in the warmth. But this is not the life I live. My office is filled with papers to grade, my calendar crowded with review sessions and meetings. Even in this pandemic the grocery store and farmers' market are packed with people. The traffic in the parking lots is unspeakable. These are not moments I should think anyone would wish to linger in, pandemic or not. 

But Advent is not a season for lingering—it draws us out, propels us forward. It calls us not to sit out and watch the world go by, but to live as if we are bringing something to birth within the world and within ourselves. And as with all births, to be ready without quite knowing when we will be brought to our knees in labor. In a homily for students at Georgetown, theologian Walter Burghardt, SJ, reminded them—and us—to be people of ceaseless hope, a people always living into tomorrow. We are asked in Advent not to simply endure the waiting, the frustrations, the difficulties. Instead, we are asked to live with and into all the possibilities the difficulties open up: “This very moment, with all its imperfection and frustration, because of its imperfection and frustration, is pregnant with possibilities, pregnant with the future, pregnant with Christ.” 

My body still remembers the bone-weariness of being pregnant, the all-encompassing work of laboring to bring my sons into the world, those frustrations and difficulties never overshadowing the hopes I cradled in my heart for them. So I should not expect in Advent to be other than weary and stretched to my limit, for in this moment, I, too, am pregnant with Christ.

— Adapted from M. Francl-Donnay, Waiting in Joyful Hope, Liturgical Press, 2020.

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Illustration, Jacques Daret, Altarpiece of the Virgin Wikimedia