First Sunday of Advent

Today we begin a new liturgical year. It is a new beginning, where we walk again through the life of our Lord Jesus Christ. Why do we need to tread on his footsteps every year? Because once is not enough. We human beings need to be reminded of important things over and over again, because we forget or because it takes us a long time to grasp its full meaning. That’s why companies need to keep advertising their brand names, with a logo to remember their products. The liturgical year is like a spiral where we run around our Saviour, every lap a bit closer to him. Or like a meteorite circling around the sun, being attracted by its gravitational force, until one day it will be sucked into its fiery core. Hopefully one day we will be ready to jump into the immensity of God.

It is a reminder of our travelling nature. We are pilgrims on this earth. We come from God and we go back to him. We would like to find our home here, but we are not made for this world. We keep trying to build our permanent nest here. We would like to stop time, thinking that here below things won’t change or they are going to last for ever. We are constantly changing, in the making, getting better or getting worse. We are born as babies and eventually we will become old and frail. Our bodies reminds us of our fleeting nature, our growing and diminishing.

Advent means coming. It is a reminder that we are going and Jesus is coming to pick us up. We need to be ready to go to the place God has prepared for us. We are travellers, pilgrims, wanderers. We are people from a different world, displaced, refugees, migrants from a foreign land. Our time here is a preparation for eternity, our final destination. That’s why we need to travel light, with a quick pace, with our eyes fixed on our goal, not to miss it.

In the Middle Ages people used to go on a pilgrimage, either east, towards the Holy Land, or west, to Saint James’ tomb, a very long trip that lasted months or even years. It was a way to fulfill a promise, for penitential reasons or to find the meaning of one’s life. Nowadays around two hundred thousand people every year follow the Camino of Santiago, for many different reasons. All of them come back changed, by the mere fact of spending few days just walking. We have lost the sense of walking; we now drive or fly. We talk more about being fulfilled, developing our carees, achieving our personal goals. These pilgrimages remind us of our human condition, the important journey all of us are embarked on. What is important is not what we do, or what we possess, but that we keep walking towards our final destination. The way shows us who we are.

Mary, Miriam in Hebrew, means star of the sea. In the same way sailors used to orient themselves during the night on high seas by looking at the stars, we can look at our Mother, the bright star that leads us during the journey of our lives, through the treacherous passages of our trip, back to a safe and secure haven, in Jesus Christ.

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