This season of Advent always sort of sneaks up on me more so than Lent does.  It just seems we are perhaps all conditioned to fly in a whirl from Halloween to Thanksgiving and slide into the first days of Advent.  I was born two days after the First Sunday of Advent in the year 🙂  It took me many years to appreciate the season of my birth especially since I am still not an overly patient person born in the season of expectation.

Though the Feast of Epiphany is weeks away those moments of manifestation open up to me never more so than during these days that lead us to Emmanual- God among us.  The thing about epiphanies is I never know when one is going to ‘appear’ or even if I will recognize it, pay attention to it and learn from it.  I’d like to think I am always open to the possibility but then again the tendency sometimes to dismiss the ordinary -ness of grocery shopping, or filling up the gas tank on the car, or doing laundry can come easily enough when what I am expecting is something far more dramatic ( but still safe).

Last Friday I was in Shop Rite picking up supplies for a baking marathon that hasn’t happened yet.  I pushed my cart from aisle to aisle, checking things off my list when I turned a corner and suddenly thought of Thomas Merton on the corner of 4th and Walnut.  I was flooded with images of all the people in my life who are no longer alive in this world and of Christmases past and how hard and happily everyone worked and pulled together to make Christmas ‘happen’ again so magically and profoundly.  I come from a family of immigrants who each year when I was a child gathered at my parents apartment for 36 hours of cooking and eating while the men played cards all night and the women and children snuggled into a few beds for a few hours of sleep.  I wish I had one of those days again.  Except for those of us who were young  and very young in those days most of those people are no longer with us.  My parents are long gone from this life and my husband’s parents went home to heaven earlier this year.

I finished my shopping in a daze of sorts as I took a long and loving look at all those others at Shop Rite and tried to see  them ( and  me) for who we were in that moment-some grieving, some tired, some counting every penny, visions of sugar plugs dancing in the heads of others, emotions of joy and gladness, peace hope, serenity, expectation-oh, the energies that were flying around were making me dizzy!  The divine in the midst of the human transcended the cold and even the coats, scarves and layer of sweaters could not hide the dazzle  of their beauty.  Isn’t that what Merton meant by what he saw and felt?  He wrote:

In Louisville, at the corner of 4th and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I was theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers.  It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world,  the world of renunciation  and supposed holiness…I have the immense joy of being a man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate.  As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are.  And if only everyone could realize that! But it cannot be explained.  There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”  (From Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander).

That’s my Advent epiphany  and these are my Advent photos  on the road to Brooklyn- that no matter who we are, where we are, who we may pretend to be, or want to be, that we get up each day-some days perhaps more hopeful than others- and do the best we can.  It is a season-less message that is eternal and incarnational, that reminds us that the Christ is born again each day when we are,  “walking around shining like the sun”.  Advent Blessings.