By Stephen Lacey
Originally posted on www.catholicweekly.com.au
Nowadays, Point Clare is a commuter town with an Aldi supermarket and views of Gosford high-rise apartments. But growing up there as a child, it was a semi-rural railway town, with just a corner store run by a bloke named Arthur Leader.
Leader’s Store was a fibro and timber maw of dust and shadows. It had a Franciscan austerity, with a couple of rows of wooden shelves that Arthur had knocked together himself, and a counter down the back, where he sat in the dark like an avuncular ghost, listening to the horse racing on a crackly transistor radio.
His shelves were empty, apart from a few packets of SAO biscuits, a tin of Milo, and some boxes of Sunlight Soap. His one beaten up chest freezer contained bait-prawns, and Sunnyboys; those delicious tetrahedral ice blocks of orange.
In Point Clare, it felt as if we were always waiting for something.
We waited for our daily bread to arrive at Leader’s in the afternoon, a white tank loaf wrapped in tissue paper.
We waited (or at least my parents did) for the Daily Mirror to be hurled onto the platform as the “paper train” blurred through the station.
And because our village wasn’t connected to “town water,” we waited for the bruised storm clouds to pass over our house to fill our galvanised tanks.
We also waited for our favourite TV shows (Netflix being several decades away). I waited every afternoon for Skippy, and Why is it so? presented by the crazy-haired Julius Sumner Miller. My parents waited weekly for Homicide and Division 4.
Being a child with a keen sense of mischief, I waited for Cracker Night, gradually building up an arsenal of skyrockets, ball shooters and bungers, ever eager to blow up a neighbour’s letterbox.
Sometimes, we simply waited for something to happen. Anything. And we were good at waiting because we were used to it. The waiting was part of life.
People aren’t terribly good at waiting these days. They’re not used to it, because everything is right here, right now.
Consequently, we’ve become less tolerant of those rare occasions when we do have to wait, such as if our mobile phone takes an extra few seconds to load a story, or if someone doesn’t hit launch control as soon as the traffic light turns green.
Nowadays we don’t even have to wait for Christmas. The tinsel and fruit mince pies are in the shops come mid-October. At the current rate, Christmas will be a 365-day opportunity to buy more stuff.
Back in the day, our Advent calendar would come out on 1 December, and we’d eagerly count down the days until the arrival of our tree and the gift of Jesus Christ.
The tree, always a scruffy casuarina, was axed illegally from the bushland behind our house and dragged into the living room, to be put in a bucket of soil and stones on Christmas Eve. I’ve come to associate Christmas with the smell of that dying scrub oak.
It was all so special. Because waiting is special.
Advent is special.
“When the Church celebrates the liturgy of Advent each year, she makes present this ancient expectancy of the Messiah. (CCC: 524).
Notice the word, “expectancy.” We use the same word to describe a pregnancy. Imagine how excited (and no doubt a little nervous) a young Mary must have been, knowing she would be delivering the “Son of the Most High” (Luke 1: 32).
As we head into December, each of us should approach Advent with that same level of yearning, excitement and nervous energy, as Our Lady.
In the words of Archbishop Anthony Fisher OP, at this time last year:
“That Christ will come again is something for which we hope, and the more we anticipate that coming with longing and excitement, the more we pray for it and help bring it about by making “God’s kingdom come and will be done” in our lives, the more hopeful and hope-giving we will be.”
Enjoy your Advent with Anticipation. Longing. Excitement.
Like bread and rain…the waiting will be worth it.
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