Nicholas Collura, advent

Day 24: December 22 

Reflector: Nicholas Collura 

Image Title: Kitchen table, Shuinota House, L’Arche Seattle

Image Source: Jessica Liu 

I am a palliative care chaplain, and a dying woman told me once that what she wanted from the precious weeks that remained to her was simply to be with her loved ones. “It sounds silly,” she said, “but even if there’s nothing to do or say, I just want to sit and look at them.” 

In fact, nothing sounds more sacred to me than a dying person gazing at the faces of those she loves. Mary sings a dramatic canticle about God’s reign of justice, but what it actually looks like for the meek to inherit the earth involves personal and collective conversion from ego to simplicity. And so the final detail in today’s reading is a continuation, not a negation, of Mary’s prophetic vision: she remains with her beloved cousin Elizabeth in a remote backwater for three months. 

W.H. Auden described the Nativity as a time when “everything became a You and nothing was an It.” Mary’s canticle transposes this reality into a political key that is relevant for us today: those who are discarded as cogs in a capitalist, consumerist machine must be treated with dignity, filled with good things (Luke 1:53). Yet what this looks like on the individual scale needn’t be grandiose: God looks with favor on our lowliness (Luke 1:48). When I think of moments in my life when I lived a Nativity or a Visitation kind of experience, I think of the L’Arche community (pictured here) for people with and without intellectual disabilities with whom I spent three simple, luminous months. Reader, whose faces will you contemplate, in person or in your mind’s eye, today? Whether we are celebrating Christmas with loved ones or alone, might this year be teaching us our need for a quality of love that we often only grasp when dying — for a simplicity of being in which everything and everyone is a You and nothing and no one is an It?

Nicholas is a palliative care chaplain in Philadelphia and is a visiting retreat director at St. Raphaela Center.