By Barbara Falconer Newhall
Advent starts today. This Sunday is the first day of the waiting that Christians do — if they’re not too busy shopping and hanging up Christmas lights — during the four weeks leading up to Christmas.
What are they waiting for? For a little light to shine on Earth. For things to fall into place, for the painful things that don’t make sense to make some sense. To be loved. For a smile from the Universe.
Here’s part of the lectionary that many Christian congregations will be reading today. It’s from Hebrew scripture. Really, really old words set down in Jerusalem that still resonate 2500 years later.
Isaiah 64
O that you would tear open the heavens and come down,
so that the mountains would quake at your presence–
as when fire kindles brushwood
and the fire causes water to boil . . .
The Virgin Blanca — All Smiles
Christmas is coming. What will it be like? I’m thinking, no quaking mountains, no tears in the firmament. But lots of simple, joyful moments like the one between the smiling baby Jesus and his smiling mother that I spotted in the Cathedral at Toledo, Spain, last month.
It’s the Virgen Blanca, a 700-year-old Romanesque statue that, like the passage from Isaiah, has something to say to the twenty-first century.
More Baby Jesus at “Christmas Eve in Mexico — It’s All About the Baby Jesus.”