Advent 2025 : day thirteen

 

Once upon a time, many years in the past, there lived a young man, in a valley in a city built on seven hills. Each Sunday, he would get up bright and early and make the short walk to the house of the young woman he loved, stopping on the way at the boulangerie, to pick up two fresh-from-the-oven pains au chocolat, and at the tabac, to collect a Sunday paper, stuffed with weekend supplement sections. Then they would sit and drink coffee and eat their pains au chocolat and read the supplements, before walking up the hill to church. [1]

On a street between where the young man and the young woman lived, a street that ran parallel to the one with the boulangerie and the tabac, there was a gift shop. The kind of shop you could not walk past without looking in the window, for something new. The kind of shop you might turn into, at any time of year, and find the perfect gift to hold onto, to give a friend or relative when Christmas came around. The kind of shop that has, in cities up and down the land, been put out of business by online shopping.

These days, it is perhaps harder to find the perfect gift, in good time in advance, not only because we have withdrawn from the physical world but because the virtual world shapes us for immediacy. But the perfect gift might be in your hands: your own, undivided, presence the best present you have to offer (and, you don’t need to give a gift to everyone you know or have ever met; don’t need to be run ragged by the season of More Invitations Than You Can Possibly Accept).

Advent invites us to slow down enough to be present. But also, to plan in advance. Not for the Christmas that is upon us, but for the days and years and times ahead. Advent reminds us that the first coming of Christ – his incarnation – was a plan set in motion from before the creation of the world: God’s desire to be one with us, to be one of us, to unite heaven and earth. To savour the anticipation of seeing our surprise and delight. Might we rediscover this for ourselves?

 

[1] I know the young man and the young woman, though they are no longer young. They married, and he brings her coffee before she gets out of bed each morning – not only on Sundays – but they no longer live close to a boulangerie where people queue out the door waiting patiently for the oven to be opened.