Theologically, Advent is a time of patient waiting.
Practically, Advent is also a time we dwell sadly on bygone holiday memories as we endure an uncertain present and entertain dubious promises of a happier future.
Faced with all these conflicting emotions, it’s no wonder Christmas is a stressful time of year.
The Sunday before Advent, four members of our family went Rome to celebrate my spouse’s birthday by basking in the city’s incomparable art, architecture, and antiquity.
Despite the effervescent Francisco Champaign that teases the hopeful these days, I kept seeing the ghost of an old, dead pope in Roma Aeterna.
This was the first trip to Rome for Martha, Katie, and Victoria, so each new sight was eagerly studied. Shortly after sunset on our first day, we walked briskly down the Via Leone IV until we stood awestruck in front of the ugly brown wall that surrounds Vatican City. Soon we found the Tuscan colonnades that expand four columns deep to encircle St. Peter’s Square. In the dark, a handful of pedestrians wandered around the square, and we stopped to stare respectfully at the most famous basilica in the world.
That was the beginning of a week that included two events starring Pope Francis: a Sunday mass to canonize six new saints, and a general papal audience Wednesday in the square.
In the latter pope sighting, the crowd huddled beneath umbrellas for three rainy hours until the Pontiff emerged amid rays of sun (a trick Barack Obama has not yet managed). The pontiff rode his pope-mobile up and down roped-off pathways. The crowd, focused on Papa Francisco, swayed, stretched and mounted rickety folding chairs to find a clear camera angle unblocked by large nuns straining at the ropes. A group of Mexican pilgrims in front of us waved an elegantly embroidered white sombrero they may have hoped to plop on Francisco’s head, but he drove quickly passed them with a fixed smile. (Victoria beat a Filipina nun to a perfect pope-photographing vantage point, which provided nice Facebook souvenirs.)
Clearly Pope Francis is a charismatic figure and the crowds adore him.
So it seems strange, even to me, that the pope I kept seeing in my mind’s eye was a distinctly non-charismatic pope with heavy brows and dark, sad eyes.
Pope Paul VI, who was elected to the office in 1963, was still relatively fresh in the job in October 1967 when I visited Rome on a religious retreat sponsored by the U.S. Air Force. As one of the few non-Catholic members, I made it a point to attend all the churchy gatherings. As a result, I saw Pope Paul three times that week (which, as it turned out, was three times more than we saw the chaplain who arranged the events.)
Four popes have reigned since Paul died in 1978, and two of them – John Paul II and Francis – are beloved by the people and aggrandized by the media.
But as I walked around St. Peters with my family last week, it was the image of Pope Paul that kept coming to my mind. When I looked up to the windows outside the papal apartments, the memory of Paul was uncannily vivid.
Back then, we had waited for hours for Paul’s appearance, so the crowd cheered when the window finally opened and the red papal coat of arms was dramatically unfurled. When the tiny figure of the pope appeared at the window, the crowd exulted. A middle-aged woman in the crowd, sensing we Americans were had no idea what to do, urged us to hold up “something of value” so the pope would bless it. Hastily, we reached into our shirts and lifted our dog tags as far as their chains would permit. Some in the crowd may have though we were ritualistically sniffing them. But when the Pope intoned the magic words in his nasally voice, “in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti,” presto! Holy dog tags dangled in our youthful bosoms.
The Sunday Angelus is a ritual that has happened thousands of times since that morning in 1967, but when I returned to that special place 47 years later I seem to have wanted to believe nothing had changed. Maybe I wanted to be 21 again, filled with naïve wonder at the mysteries of the life, and maybe I wanted to see Giovanni Batista Montini – the pope of Rome when I was first there – living and breathing and lingering irrationally like the shades of my youth. (For more about my specious youth and the dour pope, see http://bit.ly/1hKdOHm).
Thus it happened that one of the more mystical moments last week (for me, anyway, not my traveling companions) was a quick visit to the polished tomb of Paul VI.
The simple marble plate was replaced recently to add the word “BEATUS” to note Paul’s recent promotion to “Blessed” status, a step just short of sainthood. As I understand it, Paul needs to produce one more miracle before he earns the final merit badge. The miracle credited to him took place inside human reproductive plumbing, which may be deemed appropriate for the author of HUMANAE VITAE, or perhaps is better categorized under the less said the better.
As I lingered briefly in front of Paul’s tomb (very briefly because our 30-person guided group had already sped by in search of more interesting relics), I felt a strange sense of simultaneity.
On the one hand, much of my visit to Rome last week had resurrected old but fresh memories of a particularly exciting time in ecumenical history. Paul met that week with Athenagoras I, the Ecumenical Patriarch, to heal a 1,200-year-old rift between the Eastern and Western Churches, and I witnessed the pope and the patriarch stand as brothers at the papal altar beneath Bernini’s bronze baldachin. The day before I saw Paul smiling and gesturing behind a window in a small courtyard where I was close enough to see laugh lines crinkle around his eyes and his gold pectoral cross sparkle in the sun. He was in the fourth year of his 15-year reign and he had every right to regard the future with hope and confidence. I was 21, and I claimed the same right.
Standing briefly in front of Paul’s tomb, I was reminded that he is gone and, judging by the indifference of other tourists, mostly forgotten.
Yet last week I envisioned Paul in all the ancient sites around St. Peters that pre-date us both by hundreds of years, and will certainly post-date us for hundreds more.
As I pause to reflect on this strange sense of the coexistence of distinctly different eras, I’m led to the conclusion that it is not strange at all.
I think it stems from a common, perhaps universal, human trait that enables us to sense God’s view of the mysteries of time.
As the Advent Season progresses, I dare say all of us will have a similar sense of living in two different times.
Christmas lights and colors will bring back memories of loved ones long gone, of old friends and neighbors and teachers no longer here, of houses and homes and apartments that no longer exist.
If I spent Advent remembering dear old folks and places that seem irretrievably gone, I would be in tears all month.
But God’s promise is that they are not gone. Not Mom. Not Dad. Not even Paul VI.
Our memories may be wistful but need not be sad. God – the Great I AM who dwells in our past and in our future as abundantly as in our present – assures us that no important person or event or era is gone forever.
Just as Advent is a time of patient waiting for a great joy, so our lives may be times of endurance and anticipation of God’s promises.
And the time we spend waiting is merely an illusion.
“But do not ignore this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day,” says the writer of 2 Peter 3:8-9. “The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance.”
It may take more patience than we think we have to wait for all that is promised at Advent.
But while we wait, God provides us with glimpses of the good that is to come.
And God reassures us that in God’s good time, the good will come indeed.
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