A time to wait

Whenever father, mother or the two fly in from Dubai, where he works, and sister and I go to the airport to fetch them, I—since I do not drive, younger sibling does and she has to find a parking space—am usually first between us in the arrival area, on the lookout for our comeback folks.

This biannual ritual, which I  look forward to with eagerness, usually finds me craning my neck, the better to spot either parent among the people streaming past immigration counters and luggage conveyors onto the sidewalk.

This exercise is like looking for Wally on a page. The difference is that l can find Wally without going through the cat-and-mouse game I sometimes find myself playing with airport guards when I breach the line that welcoming parties are forbidden to cross.

Parent-spotting is usually the last part in our preparations for father and mother’s return. Getting ready for them also meant cleaning the house, posting cheery, desktop-printed welcome banners on the wall and making sure the master and lady of the house have something to eat when they arrived. Before we picked up Mama in October, we stopped by a sidewalk flower shop to buy a bouquet of bright red roses that we gave her at the airport. Later, we drove through a fast-food joint to order her welcome meal.

Anticipating the homecoming of our parents helps me understand Advent. The Church teaches that this season centers on the theme of waiting for the coming of  our Lord Jesus Christ. The waiting you and I are invited to practice is an active one, like our wait for loved ones who are on their way home. This waiting is unlike Juan Tamad’s stakeout beneath a guava tree, with his mouth agape, ready to catch and eat fallen fruit. It is unlike the dreadful, defensive or indifferent wait of the wayward for the handing down of a judgment of doom.

Penitents lining up in a downtown church at sunset yesterday to confess and be absolved of their sins edified me about the vigilant wait for Jesus. Battling to keep our hearts pure is one form of it. This, I believe, is why Saint Paul, as Advent begins, sounds like a general issuing marching orders: Cast away dark deeds. Wear the armor of light. Clothe yourself in Jesus. Don’t give even an inch of ground to the desires of the flesh.

Meeting Jesus in his sacramental presence is a form of active waiting, too. It means that we do not sit idly in expectation of an apparition but get up, leave our homes and find the nearest adoration chapel where we can sit at the feet of the Lord in the monstrance. I learned just by looking at those who knelt in front of the Blessed Sacrament at the cathedral last night. I have faith that in their heart of hearts, they knew they were becoming familiar with the Lord so that when the time comes for them to meet him, they will not regard him with the awkwardness or suspicion with which we tend to treat strangers.

Life is, in a sense, to borrow from the poet Gemino Abad, “forever Advent.” Christmas comes in a couple of weeks, so Advent is a time to look forward to the anniversary of Jesus’ birth thousands of years ago. Judgment Day will come at a time that only our heavenly Father knows, so history is the long Advent season before Jesus’ second coming. We do to Jesus what we do to the least of our brethren who, in his own words, are with us every day. So our lifetimes are part of an Advent in which Jesus comes to us, as Blessed Teresa of Calcutta put it, in the distressing disguise of the poor.

Last night, I lit the first purple candle on the Advent wreath in our living room. As I did so, my thoughts drifted to our Filipino brothers and sisters who still reel from the impact of supertyphoon Yolanda. Advent is harsh if one has to wait for the Lord without a roof over one’s head, or wait for Christmas without that pillar—one’s family—because they are dead.

Then I remembered a picture I saw in the newspaper—of a woman praying amid the wreckage of her church. The shepherds who processed to the Child of Bethlehem came to mind, too. Like them, the survivors of Yolanda have, at the moment, very little apart from faith. We must help them recall that it was in the dead of night that the choirs of angels appeared to the shepherds, appeared bearing a message to banish fear, singing tidings of great joy. In our unceasing prayer for the deceased and the bereaved, in bringing survivors relief and in helping them rebuild, we can be the angels as we wait in this night for our morning star, our Christ.