Waiting and Wonder: Advent Reflections on Isaiah

Of all the images we have in the readings for Advent, the one that stands out to me every year is the theme of mountains and valleys, of waiting on the Lord to come and make a path through them. 

At an evening Mass in college just after my dad passed away, a priest spoke about this motif, saying that if we move in the smallest direction towards God, he will move mountains to come to us. This was such a balm to me, in the valley of grief my life was in. The language of God as a great Comforter to come and meet us in our need gave me hope.

In the different seasons of life since then during Advent - as a joyful new mother who was sleep deprived, or pregnant and anxiously waiting for baby, or grieving a loved one - this image of mountains and valleys always helped me understand the season I was in. It helped me have a both/and view of life, so that the joy of new life could be held alongside the strain. It helped articulate the yearning and patience of pregnancy. To carry both the wonder about what was silently, slowly taking place inside my heart and body, as well as the uncertainty at what lay ahead. The Advent readings that spoke about waiting for a savior to come, to make a pathway through these extremes of highs and lows, gave me strength.

As we read each year in Isaiah:

A voice cries out: “In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord! Make straight in the desert a highway for our God! Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill shall be made low; The uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain. Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken. (Is 40:3-5)

But too often when this season comes heralding joy and peace, it is easy to make them dependent on our circumstances. Or to think that making space for joy and peace is one more expectation, one more thing to add to the to do list. I can’t possibly slow down and adore the baby Jesus, I’m too busy getting ready for his birthday party.

But then grace pierces in - a scripture passage about Joseph’s doubt, and his dream with an angel announcing God’s plan, or these words of Isaiah above set to the music of Handel’s Messiah - and I remember the work that needs to be done isn’t done by me, no matter what my calendar or to do list says. He wants me to receive Christmas, not create it. He already did that – anything else is a facsimile of the real thing.

In this season, as in others, we don’t have to worry about the mountains or the valleys, we only have to put one foot in front of the other and stay faithful to the path. And if we do that, if we can let him lead us, this season can help form our faith into one like Joseph’s, like the figures in the Old Testament that learned how to stay true to God as they waited. We can become, in an age of impatience, patient people.

We need patience because something in our nature loves the drama and excitement in this passage, until it is met with the reality that this change can happen at a glacier pace. There is so much anticipation of great things, and yet we want some sign, some evidence of our God at work. We forget that he is doing all the moving and shaping and heavy lifting where we can’t see it – in our hearts. We want the wonder of Isiah’s words, and let them fan our flames of faith and hope, until we are on the path for a while and don’t see anything changing. In fact, sometimes we see things getting worse. We discover that waiting for God to move the mountains can require of us even more faith and hope. That this was, in fact, why he made us wait.

We can forget that excavations hurt. Sometimes filling in valleys feels like a teething baby and aging in-laws. We think that because we are faithful to the path, we’ve arrived at where we need to be, and forget about the part where he wants to make a straight path through our hearts. Our pride, our attachments, our unhealed wounds. Sometimes, making real progress feels like being broken, because there was some rough ground in us, and, well, he promised to smooth it into a plain.

If we can stay focused on the last line in Isaiah’s passage, though, that is where the real drama is: we are all going to see the Lord’s glory together. Can you imagine the defects and valleys we are going to want him to remove from us before that moment? The mountains of pride and wasted time and self-absorption we will want him to level? What will matter then?

As I listen again to the familiar readings this Advent, I’m reminded that the pangs of waiting are rarely met with a fulfillment that I expected. They don’t happen the way we think they should, or on our time-table. The fulfillment of God’s plans are so far above what we can imagine, and fill us with wonder whenever we see them in our lives. But some waiting - for a relationship to get easier, a weakness to change, an illness to improve - can test our faith. We hold hope loosely as we remember we are not in charge. We may struggle to not abandon hope altogether when we don’t see evidence of progress.

In our drive and eagerness, when we hear ‘make straight the path of the Lord’, we are lined up like we are in a 5K, ready to make happen exactly what we think needs to happen, until we realize God’s ways are not our ways. That it means we need to surrender, to yield, to walk slowly with him, not to move mountains he intends to move.

We need to begin with this end in mind: we are all going to see God in his glory together. Suddenly, our path is so much less about ourselves and so much more about loving the person in front of us well, of finding any stragglers, any wounded or tired neighbors, and offering them his peace and love. It becomes about letting him work through us to bring about this glory instead of working so hard to do it ourselves.

Immanuel - God with us. The joy of Christmas is not that our circumstances are ideal, or even stress-free, it is that he is with us in them. It is that the one who broke into our lives to be with us to help us on this journey is peace himself. He isn't so much a destination or a summit, but a companion on the path of love that is made when the mighty mountain of God stoops down humbly into our valley of need.

Part of the joy of Christmas is that before Christ came into the world, they didn’t have this path, or this companion. There was only the hope of a path, a distant promise of a savior. Advent is our reminder that we are on the other side of waiting for a savior to come. We are the ones who get to both know the joy and peace of Immanuel, and also the pangs of waiting to see his glory together. We get to know his gift and goodness, and we get to know our lack and need. The mountains and the valleys are all around, but the ones Isaiah is talking about are mostly inside us. It is more about the terrain of our hearts than geography.

We see these extremes in the beautiful words of Mary, who echoes Isaiah in The Magnificat:

He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and has lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty.

And we see it in the words of John the Baptist this past Sunday, when they asked him who are you?  and he answered that he was not the Messiah, but instead echoed Isaiah:

“I am the voice of one crying out in the desert,
‘make straight the way of the Lord,’” (Jn 1:23)

But how do we make straight the way of the Lord? Following John the Baptist’s example is a good place to start: we start by remembering we are not the Messiah. Then we recall his simple words: He must increase. I must decrease.

The image of the mountains and valleys reminds me of Plato’s Symposium, where Socrates discusses the nature of love with a group of his fellow Athenians. After they all give their opinion about what love is, he offers his definition: love is born of resource and need. Where there is a lack, a weakness, a valley, love is born as a resource, a power, a mountain. We see this in the love of a mother and her child - the greater the helplessness of the child, the greater the love of the mother.  Just like a child in its mother’s arms, we are making straight the way of the Lord when we surrender and trust him, and allow him to make the path straight in us. God’s gift of himself out of his goodness, is seen in the love of the Father for the Son, and the Son of his Father. It is the reason for our good news: he knows we are in need. We don’t have to have it altogether to be loved by him, in fact, the more we know that we don’t, the more he can accomplish.

When we orient ourselves to God this way, as one in need, and him as our hope, then we start to feel peace. And joy. And all the things the Christmas songs sing about. We give him the gift of self, in order to let him do all that filling and leveling and making smooth what is rough in us. We ready ourselves for Christmas by attending to the thing he came here to do – be with us, be in us. We lean on him, root ourselves in him, ask him to teach us how to love.

Somehow the idea of justice is also woven into these readings. Both Isaiah and Mary’s Magnificat reference it, and the readings from this past week include the prophet Jeremiah:

Behold, the days are coming, says the LORD,
when I will raise up a righteous shoot to David;
As king he shall reign and govern wisely,
he shall do what is just and right in the land.
In his days Judah shall be saved,
Israel shall dwell in security.
This is the name they give him:
"The LORD our justice." (Jer 23:5-7)

The savior who is coming, the Messiah, will be called ‘the Lord our justice’. Why is justice so essential to the coming of the Savior? When we think of the mountain and valley image as the scales of justice, but at an uneven bent, it represents the world when it is not in right relationship with God. When one is high, the other low. And what is ‘making straight the path of the Lord’ but balancing out those sides and filling in valleys and leveling mountains, of bringing justice? The repentance that John called for to prepare the way of the Lord is this leveling, this making straight the path of the Lord in our hearts. The reality that our hearts are off-kilter needs to be accounted for, and we need a savior to set them right, to balance the justice in ourselves. We sense our need, we know our hunger. And yet we keep trying to fill the valleys ourselves. The good news is that there is only one who can do it, and he is here, with us. He already knows about our lack and he will fill us with good things, if we let him. So we begin by letting go. By repenting. By surrender.

To stay on this path, to become a patient people, we need help. The sacraments, God’s voice in Scripture, friends that help us remember we are the need part of the equation, not the resource. We work to acquire the habits we can - the natural virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude, and self-control. But to really move on this path, we need to ask for the theological virtues in prayer: faith, hope and charity.

The best guide is Jesus, and his family, Mary and Joseph, who are our models of faith, hope, and love. We have John the Baptist, our North star of Advent. And we have all of the saints who ran the race and kept the faith, that light our way in the dark.

I have tried to do Advent the hard way, believing that joy would come after I get all the thoughtful gifts, after I stay up way too late to wrap them. That peace would come when all the food was cooked and I finished all the decorations. He is so generous that they always do finally come by Christmas Mass.

But this year, thanks to the pain from trying and failing in years past, I have found a deeper surrender. It is clear that I can’t plan my way to joy and I can’t work my way to peace. Those only come by showing up each quiet morning by the lit tree, to pray and to practice letting go. By letting him do the deep work in me of tearing down my mountains of self-reliance and busyness and resentment, and filling in the valleys of doubt and fear and stress. By letting Him do what he came here to do: to be with us.

The coming of Emmanuel isn’t about showing off, it is when he showed up. He came little, vulnerable, helpless. He came as need. Because he knew that love would come into our world that way. He modeled for us the way to walk the path of love, the path that leads to when we will see the glory of the Lord, together. We wait in wonder for that, but thanks to his birth, we get to wait with him. It is Heaven on the way to Heaven, as St. Theresa of Avila said, and by spending time with Him in Advent, we learn how to have Christmas on the way to Christmas. There is nothing more we could want.