A great many Christians recently celebrated the arrival of Advent, marking the beginning of the Church’s liturgical year. Such a start allows us to begin anew—not by starting over, like taking up a new exercise routine, but by going deeper—deeper into the paradoxical reality of the Triune God with us, yet far off. Advent is a season of anticipation, of waiting, of remembering, of slowing down to reflect and contemplate. It is the season in the Church year where we can discover within ourselves the varied ways we’ve lost the aims and purpose, where we’ve fallen short. At the most fundamental level, we might say it is the most truthful of liturgical seasons because we must learn to name our deepest despair and disillusionment with being people whose lives are constantly lived reckoning with God’s absence-as-presence.

It seems to me that we are not alone in such a picture. Consider the life of Jesus’s parents as we find them in the early places of Matthew’s and Luke’s Gospels: on the one hand is Mary, full of hope and faith, willing to accept the radical and hazardous change her life is about to undergo. Then there is Joseph, whom it is easy to overlook in these passages. Yet, New Testament scholar Kenneth Bailey suggests that Joseph’s consideration of what is happening with Mary may be less a passive contemplation, and, instead, a “fuming over the matter.” Joseph was deeply angry and frustrated over what was happening and let Yahweh know it. Maybe it was his honesty about the bitterness of his experience that makes Joseph such a faithful witness. These two people best exemplify the sober reality of Advent: a season of hopeful anticipation and preparation, but one grounded in hard and somber realities—realities of tragedy amidst the continuum of human experience—that so many of us live through.

Sister Joan Chittister, writing generally about the liturgical life, says that it tutors us in “what it means to be human on the way to God—to suffer and to wonder, to know abandonment and false support, to believe and to doubt—the liturgical year breaks us open to the divine. It gives us the energy to become the fullness of ourselves.” As we (re)turn to Advent, a space is held for us to notice and name all the hope, and, like Joseph, the places of ‘fuming’ we discover in ourselves.

But what does any of this have to do with adoption, or more to the point, adoptees? As an adoptee, it seems to me that a great many of us are all too familiar with absence-as-absence not absence-as-presence. Our lives are often marked by estrangement, false support, and the tendency toward profound despair, always working in us. We carry in our bodies a genetic and biological “story” that is rendered quiet, or even unintelligible, in an adoptive context that can have an utterly different story to tell; the adoptive context must necessarily struggle against being a place that exacerbates the paradoxical knot of absence-as-absence while trying to be present. Consequently, the adoptee is left always wondering, even if they are not consciously aware, about the radical absence of the parents and place that shaped and brought them into the world.

In a bleak twist, then, we adoptees always live in the season of Advent. We are a type of Advent people as we are always waiting and anticipating, wondering and despairing, but struggling to move through it. We are uncertain how these experiences can be held inside the vast hope that constitutes Advent, too.

And what, exactly, might that hope be? Most of us are familiar with the salvation messages in which Jesus came to take away our sins, paying the debt we should’ve paid, and on it goes. What these messages can miss is the centrality of the Incarnation itself. The central witness of the Church is that the Triune God, in Jesus Christ, has participated comprehensively in human life, remolding it in himself. Yes, sin has been, and is being, healed. But, more wonderfully, by Jesus sharing in every facet and moment of human life and experience, nothing of human life is outside his reshaping and healing presence. Most fundamentally, our estrangement from God, and the cascading impacts of that fracture, has been filled with the Triune God’s presence. The human personhood we once had before the Fall has been rendered possible. 

But as lovely as this is, we must not miss that it doesn’t avoid the tragic and tragedies of life. The Incarnation of Jesus Christ invites us to consider that healed humanity doesn’t come by working around the fractures and fissures of life. Rather, it is discovering and experiencing Jesus Christ through and in the fractures that healed personhood and humanity emerges. Mary’s faith is never absent in Joseph’s struggles. Hope, then, is not the absence of tragedy, but a placing of it within the reality that God, in his Son, has shared in tragedy such that it, too, might be made anew. 

You see, Advent is not the end, but merely a beginning. Advent peers toward Easter, just as Easter peers back to Advent. Yet, the journey between the two is a pilgrimage replete with numerous stops: from the reflecting and anticipation of the coming Messiah, to arriving at the manger of our fellow adoptee, Jesus, the Incarnate One of the Triune God. We see glimpses of Jesus in childhood around the Temple, and encounter him again years later when his public ministry begins. We continue with him as he makes his way to the Cross, and we are surprised by the Resurrection and inauguration of the healing of all things that constitutes it.

The whole story that the Church is living into, from Advent to Easter, reveals the depth of Jesus’s participation in the kind of creational rupture that we, as adoptees, are all too familiar with. We discover Jesus seeing, hearing, and understanding the ache and the frailty, the anxieties and the deep sadness—oh, the sadness, fear, and anger—but not as an intellectual project. He gets these because this was the very shape and substance of his life. He understands it from the inside—from his whole self. He knows the delicacy of gestation and birth. He knows despair and rejection. He knows anger and fear. He knows injustice and helplessness. And so long as we, as adoptees, continue to struggle and inwardly wrestle with these, he, too, wrestles. He remains in solidarity with us through it and in it, until he returns once more to bring to completion all that he began.

This is the crystallization of the divine-human encounter that the liturgical year guides us into. This is how we become “broken open to the divine,” to rephrase Joan Chittister. In being so open, we encounter the One who is capable of forming the deep places of our lives. The fractures of being an adoptee do not have the last word. Instead, they become a feature of a beautiful work the Triune God is doing to form a renewed life in us that faithfully holds the fractures in hope.

The invitation to we adoptees this Advent is to take the pilgrimage anew into the life of Jesus. It is, to nod once more to Joan Chittister, to penetrate, to plumb, to dive deeply into our lives so that we might discover that the God who created us is still with us. May we find a Companion inviting us to move through Advent toward the promise of a truer human life in Himself, molding life where we were convinced life could never emerge, filling an absence we once thought was endless.

Joyous Advent and Merry Christmas, my friends.