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            -Ad-venire. To come. Not only to come, but also a directional coming, an arrival. Ad: to, towards. Venire: to come. Something nears in this season.
            -Something comes? Something, not someone?
            -That is all I am saying, that something comes.
            -But Advent is the season of the coming of the Lord, the coming of Christ.
            -So you say.

            In reflecting on the days leading up to Christmas, we must constantly keep in our minds and spirits the word Advent and its origins in Latin. For the advent is not a verb of expectation or of waiting; it is a verb of motion. And in order to fully understand the mystery of that verb, we must take ourselves back in the tradition of Loyola and re-read in the tradition of Derrida the texts of the season of Advent. St. Ignatius-Derrida, Jacques of Loyola, guide us through this time and let us see what secret is born(e) in Advent.

            Waiting. What is there to be said for the value of waiting in Advent? For in the first season of Advent, there was very little to be awaited. There was certainly, in the hearts of most, no expectation for Christ as we know him today, Christ who would later ascend the cross to for(under)go the sins of humanity.

-Mary knew what she was waiting for.
            -My soul doth magnify the Lord,  
            And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Savior
            For he hath regarded the low estate of his handmaiden: for, behold from henceforth all the        
                   generations shall call me blessed
            For he that is mighty hath done to me great things; and holy is his name
            And his mercy is on them that fear him from generation to generation.
            He hath shown strength with his arm; he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their
                  hearts.
           He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree
          He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away.
          He hath helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy;
          As he spake to our fathers, to Abraham, and to his seed forever.
                 (St. Luke 1:46-55)

             -There is neither knowledge nor waiting for Mary. There is only the past, the seed of Abraham.

            If it can be said that we wait in Advent, we certainly do not know what we are waiting for. Advent is a season in which the other, the tout autre, moves towards us. There can be no waiting in Advent, for the tout autre can never be expected. Thus the spirit of Advent is the spirit of a-waiting, of not waiting.

            -But that was then, as they say. This is now, and we know what comes after Advent.
            -But do we know what comes after that?

            The point of Advent is not a commemorative waiting, but to wait for something new, for the tout autre. One cannot wait for something that has already happened:

            Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.

We are always waiting for something to come, and it has never come. Our great mystery never states that Christ has come—it infers such, but the existence of the tout autre and its advent is a precondition of the secret, not a part of the secret itself. It is as if Christ both eternally preexisted and never existed at all.

            Thus we are faced in the season of Advent with two impossibilities of waiting: the impossibility of waiting for an event that has happened and the impossibility of waiting for something that is unexpected. 

            Yet we must wait faithfully. Advent predicates itself on the space between a/waiting, a spirit of painfully impossible waiting. The in(de)cision of a slash places within us a cut that cannot be healed—yet it is this same cut in which a hand shall be thrust and through which shall come forth (advenire) the tout autre: “My Lord and my God” (St. John 20:28). But that is a different story altogether.

A Totally Unrelated Diversion

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