For most of us, the same haunting words kick off Advent every year, because it tends to be the entrance hymn we hear at the first Advent Mass:
“O Come O Come Emanuel and ransom captive Israel / That mourns in lonely exile here / Until the light of Christ appear.”
Those words invite us to imagine a world where Christ has not yet come — and it turns out to be the very world many of our neighbors are living in right now.
Like the hymn suggests, we feel captive, lonely, and exiled without Christ.
You can think of the Israelites enslaved to Pharoah or barred from their homeland, hanging their harps up by the streams of Babylon.
But you can also think of 21st-century Western men and women, who have expressed exactly the same feelings in contemporary ways.
Jean-Paul Sarte faced life without Christ in 1946 and wrote that man “is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this earth.”
His existentialist angst has been repeated again and again in the culture.
You can hear it echoed in the liner notes of Taylor Swift’s 2022 album that saw life as a series of Midnights where she wrote, “We twist in our self-made cages and pray that we aren’t — right this minute — about to make some fateful life-altering mistake.”
You can also see it in the Oscar-winning song from the movie Barbie by Billy Eilish, a sad, melancholic song whose title is the same as the often repeated phrase in the chorus: “What was I made for?”
This kind of existential angst was exactly what Jesus Christ came to end.
The feelings of being trapped, alone, and far from home have stretched from Adam and Eve to each of us when we feel out of place and out of sorts with the universe.
One of John Paul II’s favorite phrases was, “Jesus Christ reveals man to himself.” I never really understood what it meant, so I asked our friend Sister Marie-Jeanne of the Little Sisters of the Lamb to explain it.
“We see ourselves in Jesus Christ because we can only know our true self through a perfect love. But there is no perfect love apart from Christ,” she said.
This goes back to the dawn of time, when Genesis says, “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” A God who is love — Father, Son and Holy Spirit three who are one through their eternal self-giving love, one to the other — created mankind in the image of love.
God graced us with gifts that we can give away, in imitation of him. When we kept them for ourselves instead, we felt out of sorts and alien. Jesus Christ came to free us to give like him.
Pope Francis described this phenomenon in his encyclical on the Sacred Heart.
“A society dominated by narcissism and self-centeredness will increasingly become ‘heartless’,” wrote Pope Francis. “We find ourselves trapped within walls of our own making.”
This only came to an end when “Jesus came to meet us, bridging all distances; he became as close to us as the simplest, everyday realities of our lives. Indeed, he has another name, ‘Emmanuel,’ which means ‘God with us,’ God as part of our lives, God as living in our midst.”
Jesus Christ comes to make us the opposite of the lonely captive exiles we feel like.
Advent is the time of the Church focuses on this this fundamental lesson.
As the days get shorter and darker and the nights get longer and colder, we come face to face with the limitations that are built into our humanity, and we long to be freed from them.
Each year we find that Christ is our one way home.
The Advent candles start to dispel the darkness as we sing, “Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to you, O Israel.”
