December 13
“A Disruptive Force of Love”

Five weeks ago, late on the night of Friday, November 6, I was sitting in a chair outside the room where my wife Danielle was about to give birth to our first child. Margot Ross would be delivered via C-section—news we’d learned just hours before, after it was determined that the baby was in a breech position.

I sat in my papery blue scrubs, trying to stop my heart from racing, rehearsing what I would tell Danielle to keep her calm once I was sitting on a stool beside her, holding her hand. Other than the occasional nurse or doctor who waved to me before entering the surgery prep room, the hallway was empty, quiet, and still.

Next to my chair was a rolling bed with our hastily packed duffel bags and backpacks stuffed on the lower rack. We’d expected the early signs of labor to just be a false alarm, that the nurse would turn us on our heels and send us home—a good trial run for the real thing. But, it turned out, this was not a drill.

I stared at the clock on the wall, counting down the minutes till I could go in. Despite the steadiness of the second hand’s march around the numerals, time moved very slowly. With a mixture of joy, hope, and fear coursing through my veins, I said a prayer for Danielle and the baby. A half hour later, we heard Margot’s voice for the first time from the other side of the blue hospital sheet.

Looking back on the memory of that hospital hallway now, in the thick of Christmas shopping and decorations, diaper changes and crying fits, it feels to me like an Advent moment. Advent is a time of keeping vigil, of waiting, of nighttime uncertainty, anticipating the break of dawn: God’s entry into the world in the form of a man. It recalls the darkness that begins Genesis, before God spins life out of nothingness.

In his essay “Holy Night,” theologian Karl Rahner, SJ writes that night “is the time of silence and concentrated strength, self-contained, ready to wait and allow things to mature. It is in the middle of the night that the cry is heard that the bridegroom is coming. Night in scripture is the time of heavenly dreams. Because night is the time of liberation from the enslaving impressions and ties of superficial everyday routine, it a time of prayer.”

There is also maybe a small part of us that clings to Advent and the blanket of night, that wants to remain waiting in the hospital hallway just a little longer, extending the period in which we are still the one in control. Perhaps the next moment of preparation, the next thought, will finally be the one that makes us feel equal to the task, able to confidently walk through that door that you cannot walk back through.

Pre-baby life made sense to my wife and me. Our time belonged to us. Days, weeks, and months moved in a mostly predictable, mostly self-directed pattern. Our first night in the hospital with Margot swaddled in our arms taught us that was no longer the case. Her hunger and her need for love and comfort (and yes, diaper changes) did not obey any clock or distinction between AM and PM hours. Again and again, Danielle and I would awake bewildered from thirty minutes of sleep snatched here or there to the sound of crying and little limbs thrashing in the crib. And yet every time I held Margot and her slate-blue eyes looked searchingly into mine, the gears of a different kind of clock turned in my chest. The words from a speech by Bishop Robert Barron echoed through my head in the first weeks of parenthood: “Your life is not about you.”

One of the blessings of being a new parent during Advent is a heightened awareness of what this spiritual transition feels like. Like a newborn, Christ enters our lives as a disruptive force of love, upending best-laid plans and ambitions, continually reorienting us away from the self towards others. There is, admittedly, a little Herod in my soul, who enjoyed making up his own rules, and who correctly intuits that the birth of the child will threaten his power.

But vastly outweighing this calculating, worldly impulse is the hope-filled spirit of the Wise Men. They come, unaware of what or who exactly awaits them, guided by faith. On meeting the baby Jesus, they drop to their knees, overcome by joy and love—the presence of a new authority. Having arrived by one path, we are told, they departed “by another way.” Life would not be the same.

Chris, Danielle and Margot Ross are parishioners of Old St. Joseph’s. Photo provided by the Ross family.