Fourth Sunday in Advent, Cycle C. Today’s readings: Micah 5:1-4a, Hebrews 10:5-10, Luke 1:39-45
Less than a decade after the end of World War II, Irish born playwright Samuel Beckett wrote a play that mirrored the existential angst that people at the time were experiencing. The masterpiece, Waiting for Godot, tells the story of two men who do simply that: they wait for Godot.
We are not told who Godot is, neither the reason for their waiting. The men simply wait. They joke. They philosophise. They kill time.
The play leaves the audience facing the disquieting questions humanity has grappled with in the post-war period: where have all our hopes gone? Is there anything to hope for at all? What has become of the scientific and economic achievements that the Western world was confident would stave war, destruction and suffering away from humankind once and for all? And yet, humanity had just witnessed one of the bloodiest tragedies in history.
Beckett’s play leaves the audience hanging, wondering if waiting is worthwhile at all.
The situation the world was experiencing at the time was not very different from that in which the People of Israel were living 2,000 years ago. For centuries they had been hoping for a Messiah whom God had promised through his prophets but there was no sign of him. The People of Israel had grown weary and sterile. Perhaps like the two men waiting for Godot they wondered whether waiting for the Messiah was yet another futile exercise.
Elisabeth, the elderly and sterile relative of Mary, aptly represents the People of Israel who had ended up deficient in hope. In today’s gospel we meditate on the Messiah finally visiting his people in the encounter between Mary, who had just conceived Jesus in her womb, and Elisabeth, who was in her sixth month of pregnancy. Elisabeth does not see the Messiah, but she senses his presence in Mary as soon as she hears her greeting. As bearer of the Messiah, Mary’s presence is enough to fill Elisabeth with profound joy.
God visits us in a similar way. He comes not in power and might but in littleness and simplicity, in our daily lives, where his presence is easily missed.
The Holiness of Ordinary People, the recently published collection of Madeline Delbrêl’s short essays.Madeline Delbrêl knew this well. She might not have lived a life you would immediately associate with sainthood, yet today she is on the road to canonisation. Born in 1904 in France, she declared herself an atheist at a young age. She became even more emblazoned about the absurdity of life when her lover became a Dominican priest, at which point she wrote her atheist manifesto entitled “God is dead. Long live death!”
In the suburbs of Paris where she lived, where French communism and animosity against Christianity was the order of the day, and after spending a year in a psychiatric hospital for severe depression, Delbrêl rediscovered God and spent the rest of her life seeking to make him known to those around her.
One of her short essays, translated to English in a recently published collection entitled The Holiness of Ordinary People, bears the title “We, the Ordinary People of the Streets”. In it, Delbrêl is particularly interested in what we might call a Mary-Elisabeth moment, that is, our encounter with our Saviour in the most ordinary of ways. “There are some people whom God takes and sets apart,” she claims. But, “there are others whom he leaves in the masses and whom he does not ‘withdraw from the world’... In the street, pressed in the crowd, we establish our souls as many hollows of silence where the word of God can rest and resound… To us, the people of the streets, it seems that solitude is not the absence of the world but the presence of God… The whole world is like a vast face-to-face meeting with God from whom we cannot escape.”
Like Elisabeth, this encounter must fill us with great joy.