Pregnancy as Advent

The other day, for the first time, my wife looked pregnant. I mean really pregnant. It wasn't just the maternity clothes but more the look on her face which was a combination of "Keep the f**k away from me!" and "Please pity me!" I have been thinking lately about how this pregnancy is like the season of Advent. It involves waiting - there's no rushing this thing. The baby takes time to develop. But just as my child is developing, so too am I. Or at least I'm trying to. It is a constructive waiting, a waiting that is full of movement and growth. And this is perhaps the hardest part, not the waiting itself, but the preperation that the makes up the minutes, hours, days, and months of waiting.

It has been hard to adjust to this. I've often imagined what it would be like to have a child. I've often thought to myself, "When I have my own child, I will do (insert idealistic patronly act here)." Yet more and more I look at myself and wonder, am I even the person, let alone father, that I want to be? I worked in a corporate office for many years and often in my boredom I would look at my coworkers in their cubicles and wonder who among them, when they were young, said that they wanted to be an office worker when they grew up? No, in grade school everyone wanted to be an astronaut, a ballerina, a veterinarian, a doctor, etc. And even though I find myself perhaps headed in the right direction for the career field I have chosen, a lot of times I still don't feel that I am the person that I had hoped I would be as an adult.

Giving up or letting go of things is often associated with Lent, but I think that it is also an important part of Advent, any advent that is. New birth requires the falling away of something in order that birth is possible. In St. John's Gospel, the Christ says that "unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit" (v. 24). So now I am left examining myself. What must be let go of? What must fall away so that something much better can be born? It is not just a list of bad habits that I am trying to compile here, although those, too, must be let go. It is also my outlook on life - perhaps hopes or dreams that were once important to me. And what I find hopeful about this is that I am trying to approach it in a way that appreciates the letting go as much as the hope for what is to come. The things that are let go are not necessarily bad things; I am not attempting a rite of purification here. What is being let go, so I am trying to remind myself, are the things for which it is simply time to go. It is their time to be scattered to the wind in the full appreciation of the pain of letting go and the joy in wondering onto what fertile ground they will fall.