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what to expect when you’re adventing

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Advent came alive for me two years ago.

In the span of one season, one calendar month, my world was transformed from infertility to fertility.

The first Sunday of Advent had brought with it deep breaths and a resolution to Just Forget How Awful Advent Felt Last Year And Make It Through Mass Today Without Crying. The second Sunday slumped forward into a familiar place of pessimism: It Is Never Going To Happen For Us And I Wish I Could Stop Wanting It To Happen.

But then.

There was this miraculous Wednesday in the middle of a cold December week. That brought with it one faint pink line – the first that dared seem real and not mere hope. And with it (and the second, and third tests that followed, just to be sure) came amazement.

What seemed so easy and natural – and often unwanted – for so many women was for us the culmination of months and months and months of charts, drugs, hormones, doctors and tests. To say nothing of prayer, tears, anger and more prayer. Frustrated, fitful prayer. We had to work at this, and it was painful, all-consuming work at times.

But then the sorrow was transformed. The tears turned into dancing.

My astonishment was palpable. I remember sitting at church during the third week of Advent, giddy from the Knowledge and barely off Cloud Nine. I realized that I would no longer have to grit my teeth through another Christmas chorus of “For unto us a child is born!” Instead, I was entering into expectancy just as the Church sang its praises – as the symbol of our openness and readiness towards the in-breaking of God in our lives.

I can mark my journey that Advent through Scripture. I went from wallowing in the psalmist’s pit of despair to marveling at an angel’s startling announcement of conception. Could it really be?

The season’s symbols and stories shone in a new light. The tale of long-barren Elizabeth and Zechariah was no longer dry history. The leaping and blessing of John and Jesus in the womb no longer echoed like well-worn lines of rote prayer. The fear, surprise, and delight of these men and women was real and enfleshed. Their stories were our own.

This Advent I am profoundly grateful, from the depths of my core where that still-surprising and long-awaited life sprung, for the life of S. As we soon celebrate the anniversary of The Day We Found Out, I give thanks as well for living Advent: leaning into the unknowing and discovering God’s abundant goodness that is waiting therein.

Mystery, not magic; hoping, not having – these are the marks of the season. Of the graces to be dug from the thorny brambles of barrenness, spiritual renewal is thankfully a fruitful gift. But for me, the unexpected seasonal rebirth proved to be just as surprising: a welcome Advent guest.

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  1. Amy B says

    30 November 2010 at 4:00 pm

    Beautiful!

    Reply
  2. LindseyJoy says

    19 December 2011 at 2:18 pm

    lovely! first time visiting your blog & have loved the advent stories (and the colbert video – haha). This is only my second year of really practicing advent, but I am excited to have it coincide with my second pregnancy! What an object lesson in expectation & hope 🙂

    Blessings!

    Reply

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    15 December 2011 at 2:25 pm

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I’m Laura Kelly Fanucci. Mother, writer, wonderer. This space is where I explore mothering through writing. It’s where I celebrate how God shows up in the chaos of raising children. It’s where I love to build community with readers like you. Read More…

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thismessygrace
I have a habit of walking the ATL tunnels, but nev I have a habit of walking the ATL tunnels, but never made it to terminal T until yesterday. What I found stopped me in my tracks and spun my day around.

May we let ourselves be interrupted by joy and remember the beauty of being human.

Even in the least likely places.
If our daughters had lived, we never would have pl If our daughters had lived, we never would have planted this garden. 

There are pockets of beauty in my life today that could not have existed if they had survived.

Acknowledging this does not mean I accept their loss. Or that I wouldn’t trade it all to have them here instead.

But the grieving know this strange, stubborn, saving truth: that goodness can grow in the gaping holes left by the ones we love.

I don’t know any simple ways to make sense of the hard times in which we’re living. As a porous soul, I feel it all and it breaks my heart, even as I cling to what I know is true.

But loving and losing my girls has taught me that life is both heart-breaking and resilient, that surviving is more complicated than we suspect, that most people are walking around shattered beneath the surface.

Sometimes I can catch a glimpse of it, searing as sunlight: the grief in someone’s eyes behind their anger, the burden sagging their shoulders, the past that’s poisoning their present. Few things have transformed my life more than learning to recognize pain in others.

Grief is a long letting go of a life you thought you’d have. Most of us are carrying more of it than we realize—or remember when we’re dealing with each other (especially when we’re tearing each other down).

Go gentle today. Practicing compassion and generosity of spirit will crack open more of the world and its confounding struggles. You might lose the satisfying clarity you clung to before life broke your heart in complicated ways, but you will find more of God in the messy, maddening middle.

I have learned this much from the garden I never planned to plant, from a version of life I never dreamed.
The Moment After Suffering By Jessica Powers (Sis The Moment After Suffering

By Jessica Powers (Sister Miriam of the Holy Spirit)

Time’s cupped hand holds
no place so lenient, so calm as this, 
the moment after suffering. It is like
a sunlit clearing after densest wood,
bright by antithesis.
One sits upon a stump to get one’s bearing
and to admire such evidence of day.
Thicket and tangle fade; the furtive creatures
of darkness take their leave and slink away.
One feeds upon a succulent rich wisdom
that, to the mind’s surprise, has naught to do 
with late abjection; it is revelation,
God-fathered, heaven-new.

Oh, there are woods, of course, long forest stretches
of wide inhabited darkness to be crossed,
with pain and hunger, fear of unnamed creatures,
an imminent certainty of being lost.
But even these elude this meditation,
or if intrusive bring yet more release.
One muses as to what it will be like
to step at last from final forest into 
the infinite meadows of unending peace,
a place all light and yet not lighted by
the harsh, obtrusive sun that walks our sky,
light that the soul assimilates until
not witness but participant it stands,
taking of Godhead its amazing fill.
A morning meditation after a week of hard conversa A morning meditation after a week of hard conversations.
I bristle whenever I hear (well-meaning wise ones I bristle whenever I hear
(well-meaning wise ones say)

“Little kids, little problems.
Big kids, big problems.”

I know what they mean, of course. Parenting gets more complicated as young people grow.

But when my children were tiny, I was faced with trying to keep them alive despite life-threatening complications. That wasn’t little.

I know parents with grade-schoolers on suicide watch or tweens in intense therapy. That’s not little.

Life can be complicated and challenging from its very beginning.

The deeper wisdom I find is that smaller children do bring solvable circumstances in ways that older children do not.

Wet? Change to dry.
Hungry? Feed to full.
Sad? Comfort to calm.

In the midst of potty training my fifth child, I’ve realized something that my younger self would scoff to hear:

I will miss the cloth diaper laundry.

For thirteen years the bright colors have churned in our washer, tumbled in our dryer, hung on the line. Contrary to what you might think, they’re the easiest laundry of the household. Simple to sort, quick to fold, satisfying to stack.

But we’re leaving behind this stage for bigger clothes, washed independently by bigger kids. They’ll have to figure out more messes on their own.

May I stay grateful for whatever solvable circumstances their lives bring them.

May I learn to love them through whatever can’t be easily cleaned or smoothed or sorted.
Nearly 20 years ago (!) these crazy kids graduated Nearly 20 years ago (!) these crazy kids graduated from Notre Dame. Now we’re thick in the midst of life-with-kids, celebrating middle school & preschool & everything in between. 
 
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