Advent

The year turns again.
Not with the clamor we imagine,
but quietly, as a wheel turns
somewhere beyond the fields.

This is called Advent.

A season that asks us to wait,
though no one now is patient.
The cities run on schedules,
machines hum without pause,
and the radio speaks of markets, wars,
and weather moving across the continent.

Yet the calendar insists:
prepare.

Prepare for what?
For an arrival that has been promised
for centuries.

In the churches they light a candle,
a narrow flame
vulnerable to every small current of air.

I watch it.

One could say it is only wax and fire,
a ritual repeated
because generations repeated it before us.

But I have lived long enough
to distrust the easy explanations.

Outside, winter sunlight rests
on sandstone cliffs.
A bus exhales at the corner.
Someone carries groceries home
through the early dark.

All of them included
in this strange expectation.

Advent does not reject the world.
It gathers it.

The tired mother.
The physician in fluorescent corridors.
The wanderer counting coins.
The child looking upward
and asking why the stars tremble.

Even the prophets remain among us.

Not only in scripture,
but in sudden voices
that interrupt the ordinary order of things.

Justice, they say.
Comfort, they say.
Peace, though no one knows quite how.

I walk through my day
with these words beside me.

It is possible, of course,
that nothing waits beyond the dark.

Many believe this now
and live as if the universe
were a closed room.

Yet something in the human heart
refuses that conclusion.

Night gathers early.
Still we light candles.

Perhaps the dark itself
is not the final word.

A seed sleeps inside it.

So the liturgical year begins again.

The vestments are violet.
The readings speak of watchfulness.

And I stand among others
who have stood here before me,
centuries of them,

listening for footsteps.

Not certain.
Not entirely unbelieving either.

Only attentive.

A small flame burns.

For the moment
that is enough.