When I lived in Peru, I knew a holy woman who always led the town in the traditional novena that prepared them for their big feast. She had a wonderful voice and she projected it so that a large crowd could hear her read those prayers at something close to the speed of sound. Everyone came in with a great "Amen" at all the appropriate places.

For us sisters whose first language was English, understanding her recitations was quite a challenge. Eventually, we realized that something seemed off — the prayers didn't make sense; we were calling on God to do some ungodly things.

When she sat down to explain the rituals to us, she realized that there were a couple of pages missing in her prayer book — she was skipping over very important parts that would have made sense of what came later. We enjoyed the irony that it took people who spoke poor Spanish to figure that out!

Today, we hear some of Isaiah's most famous lines, "Prepare the way of the Lord! ... The glory of the Lord shall be revealed. All people shall see it together."

Handel has taught us a magnificent way to sing about this and there are easier versions in which we can lift our voices with the same message, but what does it mean? Is it just a nice song, or is it supposed to indicate something important in our lives? (How often do we pay such close attention to the words of our hymns and prayers that they change the way we live?)

The beginning of Mark's Gospel offers us a perspective on preparing the way of the Lord. Mark tells us that John the Baptist proclaimed a "baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sin." 

Believe it or not, John and his message of conversion were immensely popular! Great joy doesn't sound exactly like the emotion brought forth by a call to "repentance" and acknowledgement of sin. What's going on?

John's call to "repentance" wasn't an invitation to penance. He was inviting people to see everything in life from a new perspective. Instead of concentrating on the past, on what they had done wrong or lost, John, like Isaiah, invited people to focus on God's promised future — a future he told them was about to dawn.

What would that future be like? Not even John could really envision it —  he sent disciples to ask Jesus if he was the "one to come, or should we look for another?" 

Jesus didn't fit the typical expectations for messiahs. To understand him, people had to return to Isaiah and ask about the servant he described. 

Isaiah wrote to people who imagined their lives as a desert wasteland. Life was dry, and arduous the road that led to unscalable mountains. Isaiah invited people under this depressing spell to listen to glad tidings, to discern the presence of God's alluring love among them. 

It was not that mountains and valleys would actually disappear from their way, but the energy of divine grace would open their eyes to a future that would come into reality with each step they took toward it.

The repentance of which John and Jesus spoke did not look backward. It was a vision of an unimaginable different future so attractive that nobody need remain stuck or freeze another in their former ways. The "strong arm" of the Lord is not coercive; the rule of God is a hand up to those who desire the grace to move forward into the type of future for which we were created.

Today, between two major feasts of the Virgin Mary, we can look to her for inspiration. Her prayer, "Let it happen through me according to your word," came not so much from a vision, but from trust that God had more in mind for her than she could imagine. 

Elizabeth proclaimed that in one simple phrase that could be translated as "Blessed are you who believed that God's promise would be fulfilled" (Luke 1:45). 

The Second Letter of St. Peter says it this way: "Conduct yourselves in holiness and devotion ... hastening the coming of the day of our God."

The Second Sunday of Advent calls us into the sort of waiting that actually hastens the fulfillment of God's reign among us. Like Mary — the Christian Scriptures' counterpart of Abraham who forged into the unknown at God's invitation — we are invited to believe so strongly in God's future that we will not hesitate to risk what it takes for it to come about. Our daily prayer is simple and straightforward, "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done." 

Will those words direct our lives or simply be rote phrases to which we can say, "Amen," without feeling their power? 

I made my first Communion when I was 8. I had waited long for it, was dressed up in a dress, veil and shoes, all of them white. I was ready for the big moment. Then, Msgr. Higgins gave the homily. He admired how we were dressed, "Little princes and princesses," and told us that it was a great day. 

Then he said something I have never forgotten. He said, "Today is the least important time you will ever receive Communion. Every time after this will build on it and be fuller of grace."

His homily also works as an Advent message that tells us: "The unknown future will bring more than we can imagine. Just keep getting readier!" That sets us off on a journey of hopeful anticipation.

As we begin Advent, we might recall some of our most memorable experiences of anticipation. Was it waiting for the birth of a child or the day of the wedding? Perhaps something seemingly much more mundane like the end of the school year, the moment when your date was to pick you up or meet you at the restaurant. 

Waiting reminds us that, like it or not, we don't control the universe.

At the same time, we won't discover the new unless we are open to it. Advent anticipation adds open-ended hope to all our anticipation. We keep growing, therefore the future is both unpredictable and promising. 

Sometimes, it seems that Advent is designed to be confusing. Theologians call it a time of "already and not yet." Today's Gospel captures that dilemma perfectly. Jesus says, "Be on the lookout!" For what? For the coming of something you can't predict, something that will take you by surprise at the least expected moment! 

Jesus consistently avoided the trap of giving details about the end times. (They were — and still are — in an unpredictable process of becoming.) Nevertheless, he offered somber hints when he described the unpredictable time to come for him. 

He said it would come, "in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or in the morning." Those were precisely the hours leading up to his passion. Jesus was arrested while praying in the evening. His interrogation by the religious leaders took place after that, presumably around midnight. Cockcrow was the moment for Peter to deny knowing him. In the morning, the Sanhedrin handed him over to Pilate. 

Those were the moments for which he was watching. The disciples remembered this clearly because those worst of times blossomed into the resurrection.

For what are we supposed to be watching? Although Isaiah asks God to rend the heavens, he describes God much more gently as our father, the potter, our redeemer forever. 

Today's Psalm speaks of God the shepherd who watches over the tender vine. This leads us to sing, "Lord make us turn to you, show us your face and we shall be saved." We realize that just knowing our God is all we need because, as Paul said, God is faithful and calls us and continually makes us capable of communion with the Son. When we are growing, that communion also keeps growing.

The Jesuit mystic Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1957), talked about how to move in this continual journey of becoming more. He wrote:

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability — and that it may take a very long time.

Sometimes we are tempted to look to the past as an ideal age: "If only I had lived in the time of Abraham or Jesus, or the days of the Latin Mass or ... [fill in the blank]." That's not what Jesus did. He knew the treasures of his tradition, he cherished them, but he knew that time moves in only one direction, therefore what is to come, hard as it might seem to be, promises to be more than this or any moment of the past. 

Our season of Advent — this year the shortest possible because Christmas falls on a Monday — invites us into hopeful anticipation. While we wait "for the revelation of our Lord," we will need to learn to appreciate Jesus' hours of passion and Teilhard's disturbing "stages of instability." We can appreciate them as hope-soaked promises in a process of growing in grace. 

Advent is the time to anticipate what we cannot yet see, and to trust that it will come. Each day's grace will build on the last.