It’s what we do anyway, without naming it anything special.

Wrapping lights around poles and chopping down evergreens and paying much attention to peppermint. It’s booking flights, or preparing beds, or making menus.

It’s noticing refugees wearing sandals in the snow and thinking of all those coats in the basement, or running out of sugar for the second time this month.

It’s the wanting for it to be different this year, more apart, less cluttered, just experienced. And if I lived for a hundred Christmases there would be a million ways to spend these days of Advent.

It means “coming.” Like a forecast, or a wave.  

A sunrise.

A washing over of an event that leaves us changed and requires some bracing.  The days are pregnant with expectancy anyway, what with Santas on trains and the red cups at Starbucks. People wear light up jewelry and blinking hats. You can’t even get an appointment to serve food in a shelter. It is a wave that crests on a lofty day, a high that you’ll ride again next year.

And we wait for what is already here, every time, as if reliving a cherished memory.  This “coming” means that what we fear most is now a thing that memory owns.  Death is just this one thing-Spectacularly transformative.  And fear can’t remain if death transforms but doesn’t kill.

This “coming” means peace, beyond the absence of war, not passive, but altogether compelling. When peace comes like fire spilling over the horizon, revealing soul and self, griefs and motives, it may end up being the only thing worth fighting for.

It’s a peace that can’t be won on battlefields or in courts, only taken.

Like wildflowers plucked from the side of the highway.

When peace enters sure as tomorrow’s sun, there isn’t an army strong enough to bear that kind of close heat.

The advent is drawing to an end and there isn’t a frenzy but just a turn of the head towards a sound. It sounds like a rustling of leaves, or a car pulling into the driveway.

There is something coming.

It’s the Wind, a gust that leaves us deep breathing as if we’ve never breathed before, and we prepare to greet her when she arrives.

This thing that is coming, it’s Day’s Beginning, Restorer of Ancient Walls, Healer to Sick Worlds, and he will cry when his wet skin hits the cold air as all babies do.

And this is why we wait year after year, leaning in towards the sound of Love relating to us in tears.

This is the advent of Christmas.