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This season of Advent offers us the opportunity to reflect upon the relevance of hope to our life, and the reality upon which that hope is founded. Hope anticipates that condition of life which has yet to relieve us form the burdens and pains of the present. The reason we can hope realistically for a better life is Christ, whose birth and life signal the underlying but hidden meaning and destiny of all human life. Key to the integrity of our hope is that we understand Christ to be human like us in all things, but sin. Unfortunately his sinlessness has become the occasion for emphasizing the difference between his life and ours, rather than seeing in his life our own possibility for growth, our own destiny. If we see his life as a pattern for our own life, we then see that hope does not exist apart from our ordinary life but in the midst of it. We live in the land of hope.
In this land there is no delusion or denial. We walk through our life, a life strewn with the rubble of disappointments, failures, anger and fear. We do not deny any of this. This is the way by which we go. But as we go, we go with the perception that all is not what it seems. As insistent as the gravity of pain is, though, one thing allows us to pick up our feet and prove gravity’s poverty. That one thing is the very fact that we live in the rubble-strewn land of hope, where nothing, not even gravity, can separate us from the love of God, and where that love of God heals in the long, still patience of night becoming dawn.
By Clay Railey