The Heart of Advent

Today is my 4-month anniversary at the Mount. Combined with the previous affiliate year, it’s been a time of intense introspection and discernment. Although the process has been good and necessary, it also feels like I’m dwelling too much on my own needs, thoughts, desires, and struggles to the exclusion of being attentive to others. When I confessed this self-absorption at our reconciliation service last Thursday, Fr. Benjamin offered a useful image: the need to enlarge my heart.

The entire season of Advent is really about enlarging our hearts to grasp the concept that God did not come to us as we would expect, as a mighty warrior in a blaze of glory and retribution, but as a human born in impoverished circumstances who would shortly, with his parents, flee violence and become a refugee for a time. After a lifetime of keeping Advent, for me, anyway, it seems I need to keep asking: Is my heart big enough to see Christ in the poor, in immigrants, in all those who challenge my narrow perceptions of who God is and where God dwells?

Each year Advent provides the opportunity to measure the size of our hearts and engage in a “cardio” program to strengthen our spiritual heart health. By the dawning of Christmas day, may we—like Dr. Seuss’ Grinch, who learned that Christmas is much more than decorating with fliffer bloofs and buying electro whocarnio flooks and eating roast beast—find that our heart has grown into a more expansive understanding of Emmanuel, God with us.