THE ART OF ADVENT There is an art to Advent: to keeping it. Advent means : “to come” and thus implies “not yet.” The four weeks of Advent are counter-cultural. We don’t do well with the “not yets,” or longing for what we want: we want it now. Longing takes a back seat to wish fulfillment. It is rather ironic that keeping Christ in Christmas has become the rallying cry for those who fear its many secular expressions, because there is no Christ in Christmas without the Christ of Advent. Even in the heyday of Christendom before the secular age, those who depicted the story of the coming of the Messiah in art encoded their images with the longing of Advent: for Christ’s ultimate coming and not just his birth. Longing infuses their images.These visionaries were painting the story of Christ’s first coming with a longing and sense of urgency for a kingdom not of this world because of the rampant injustices of their day. The magnificence of these images lies not only in the technique and the perspective of the artists, but in the way the paintings were grounded in the real stuff of human experience. Leonardo Da Vinci’s painting Virgin of The Rocks in not only considered Da Vinci’s greatest masterpiece it is also one of the most mysterious of paintings. Choosing to present Mary not with The Christ Child seated in her lap, he instead gives us a Madonna enraptured with two infants. Her right arm enfolds a child who is focused not on her as one would expect, but instead who kneels in adoration of the other infant. And with equally intensity that infant’s gaze is directed toward him. The dynamic rapport is natural between the two: the infant John the Baptist under Mary’s right arm knows the one he gazes upon is the one longed for, The Christ. And Christ in turn blesses John. This mystical fellowship is presided over by an angel whose gaze is directed to us as she gestures toward John as if to say to us “do as he doing: kneel in adoration.” And where does Da Vinci depict this divine fellowship? The landscape reflects the drama of the figures. Neither prettified nor softened ,the jagged rocks and craggy formations cloister them while also capturing the whole of creation’s longing. We can almost hear The John the Baptist we will hear from on the Sundays of Advent reminding us as he quotes the prophet Isaiah: “Every Valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made straight….” (Luke 3: 5). Perhaps so many have become so disillusioned with Christmas not just because of its blatant consumerism and profit driven impulses but because we have lost the ART of ADVENT- the art of longing. Recovering its meaning might well mean opening our eyes to the truth of our own longing….”O COME…O COME EMMANUEL…..”