There is a threefold dimension to the Advent season–past, present and future. Sometimes we forget that Advent is not simply a memory exercise of the Church contemplating the Christ event some 2000 years ago. Advent is also a time in which we prepare our hearts in expectation for Christ’s second coming. But, as then Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger noted, there is also a current reality to Advent, a realization in the midst of our own sin and darkness (and that of the whole world) of the extent to which we still are unredeemed and desperately in need of taking into our lives daily Jesus’s grace and love.
It’s hard to wait well. Waiting for this daily deepening of Christ’s redemption and for His second coming can so often become a hindrance rather than an aid to our spiritual growth. Sometimes thinking about how wonderful a future gift will be makes the current reality all the more bleak. We hesitate to contemplate the glory and love of Christ that we shall experience when He comes again because it makes us painfully aware of how sorrowful and disastrous this world is. Yes, we know that Christ is with us and that He will come again, but what we seem to know more intimately is how sad, selfish, lonely, empty, and sinful we are. In this waiting we often try either to distract ourselves from the good for which we wait or we succumb to the temptation of trying to gratify and fill ourselves with lesser goods.