December 3rd, 2024
Welcome to Advent 2024! Thank you for journeying through this blessed season with The Catholic Artist Connection. Thank you for your prayers and your presence as part of this supportive and life-giving community. May the Holy Spirit serve as a guide to your heart during these days of repentance, preparation, and waiting.
As a heads up, I’m going to be writing a bit about infertility in this reflection, so if this is a tough subject for you, feel free to skip this one. I’m praying for you!
This is a very special Advent season for me, because I am pregnant with my first child. It wasn’t particularly easy to get to this point. Depending on how you count (between taking breaks and whatever qualifies as “really trying”) it took somewhere between two and three years to get to this point. This included one mainstream fertility doctor, two NaPro doctors, one endometriosis removal surgery, and countless tests, pricks, sticks, and prayers. It felt like it was going to go on forever. Now, two-thirds of the way through my pregnancy, it feels like time is moving forward at double speed. How will I ever get the nursery completed in time? Will I finish my latest screenplay before the baby comes? How much time do I have left with just my husband?
Living with infertility (or “subfertility” as my very precise NaPro doctor calls it) is a bit like existing in an extended Advent season. There is a promise, a hope, of something wonderful ahead, of the miracle of new life. But for now, you are in the darkness and it’s difficult to imagine what Christmas might look like. It’s difficult to believe God’s promise is true. In the meantime, you have to live your life to the best of your ability, because the waiting is in and of itself holy.
When desperate to get pregnant, it’s difficult to remember that the waiting is holy. As Catholics, waiting is in fact a virtue. There are things we could do to speed up the process, to force the outcome we most desire. But we don’t do those things. Instead, we prepare our bodies, like we prepare our homes for Christ. We tend and we plant and we try to heal. We listen to the wisdom of trusted guides and we lean on our loved ones for support. But we mostly wait.
The hardest part of waiting is that we don’t know what exactly we are waiting for. Not everyone who prays with their whole heart ends up with an infant in their arms. The difficult truth is that we don’t get to decide what God has in store for us. We only get to know that God is certainly coming into our lives and that we must prepare for that entry, no matter what it looks like.
The coming of the baby Jesus caught everyone by surprise. Mary and Joseph certainly had strong expectations of what their lives together would look like. Giving birth in a stable to a child that was not Joseph’s was probably nowhere on their list of possible outcomes. The shepherds had expectations of what the messiah would look like when he arrived, probably bearing a closer resemblance to one of the three wise men than to the poor infant they found. The wise men could not have expected to find what they did after travelling all that way.
Yet, they were all prepared. We know they were prepared (or as prepared as you possibly can be) because when God came into the world they recognized Him immediately. They saw God’s promise of redemption made flesh and everything changed. Time sped up and suddenly all that waiting felt like no time at all. The Kingdom of God was at hand.
May you also recognize God’s presence in your life when it arrives, in whatever form God takes. May this Advent be a season of hope in God’s promise and hope in whatever He has in store.
Emily Claire Schmitt is a Brooklyn-based playwright, screenwriter, and dramaturg focused on excavating the divine mysteries within the modern world. She is also the executive director of the Catholic Artist Connection.
Learn more about her here.