Tuesday of the first week of Advent

“Blessed are the eyes that see what you see.
For I say to you,
many prophets and kings desired to see what you see,
but did not see it,
and to hear what you hear, but did not hear it.”

We live when we live. We do not choose the time or place of our birth. One of the points we make in Catechesis of the Good Shepherd ("the Atrium") is that God chose a specific time and place to come into the world as the person of Jesus Christ. A specific time. A specific place. There is a globe we have in the Atrium that shows only the water and the land. Often the land has a texture, like sandpaper. No countries are on this globe. But we place a small red dot at the approximation of Bethlehem in Israel. God chose a place, and this place, of all the possible locations on the earth, is the one chosen.

We pass the globe around to the children and let them feel the surface and observe the small red dot. Sometimes they ask how far away it is from where we live. Sometimes they just look at that red dot.

Another lesson in the Atrium often must happen outside the Atrium--two years ago we did this work in the parking lot of the school building. We have a long grosgrain ribbon with several colors. Each bump on the grosgrain is a millennium. It begins in blue and is marked off in huge chunks of time. Millions of years ago...we unroll the ribbon. The story of creation is marked on the ribbon timeline: the earth, the mineral world, and then life begins and advances, but such a short time compared with the long dark cold emptiness before. And then, a tiny bit of ribbon in a new color showing the time of people on the earth. After that, two tiny grosgrain ridges showing the time we have lived on the earth since Christ's birth. The children walk alongside the ribbon, a concrete symbol of the mystery of creation. And then, after the two tiny bits of ribbon showing 2000 years, there is a stretch of white ribbon. The blank page. We don't know how long we will be here, we cannot know the hour nor the day when God will be all, in all, in the parousia (the second coming).

A specific time, a specific place. We were not chosen to be those who walked with Jesus in Palestine. We were chosen to be here. And what am I blessed to see and hear? What will prophets and kings desire to have seen and heard from what I have experienced? Is there anything in my life wondrous, noteworthy, mysterious? Living in the blank page, our response time to the coming of Jesus, all I can think is "there had better be." There had better be something worthy left behind when I am gone. And I had better get to it.