The Gospel for the first Sunday of Advent might have thrown quite a few of us for a loop, since it had nothing obvious to do with Christmas but was about the end times. In Advent, we are encouraged to await Christ’s coming in the flesh, to await His ever fuller coming into our hearts through grace (which the Christmas coming allowed), and to await His coming at the end of time, or at the end of each of our lives (which His purifying presence in our hearts prepares us for). The fact that we are encouraged to engage in so much waiting during this season has got me thinking about what that entails.

Advent-waiting naturally suggests the topic of dreaming. If we wait for something that we are excited for, we tend to dream about it. We fantasize about how great it will be when it finally arrives, and this is not without its risks. Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote in The Brothers Karamazov that “love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams.”

On the plane of human love, this is painfully true. In our dreams, we often idealize the object of our love—romantic or filial—and are disappointed by his or her imperfection. Real love is messy and sacrificial, two things that we don’t often include in our daydreams. Nevertheless, it is precisely this messy love that is good for us, that, given the sorts of beings we are, lets us grow in self-gift.

On the plane of divine love, though, things are a little different. While an imperfect human person will always disappoint any idealized expectations, Christ won’t. In fact, the opposite is the case, for, “What eye has not seen, and ear has not heard, and what has not entered into the heart of man, what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Corinthians 2:9). Any idealization of ours will necessarily fall short.

That said, while our hopes in Christ can never be high enough, they can fall off to the side in inaccuracy. Advent is a time for pondering the Word of God in our hearts, like Mary (see Luke’s Gospel), so that we may have an accurate knowledge of the good Christ wants to bring us. But then we should remember that however good our conception is, what He will bring will always be better. And, of course, any notion that love in Christ won’t involve sacrifice is shattered by the fact that the wood of the manger foreshadows the wood of the Cross.

In thinking about waiting, Christ’s statement that His followers are in the world but not of the world also comes to mind (John 17). While we await Christ’s coming, we are most definitely in the world. We’re in the world today, and barring the Lord’s return, we’ll be in it again tomorrow. Christ’s statement seems to me like an odd one, at least at first blush. It’s odd because being in the world is precisely the sort of thing that tends to make one of the world.

To a degree, we choose our surroundings and influence them, but the opposite is also the case. Our family and our cultural and socioeconomic background all are given to us, and our personalities, tastes, and behaviors are in large measure formed by them. In many ways, they form us well, and we have much to be thankful for. At the same time, as we mature in our life of faith and grow closer to Christ, we are bound to notice ways in which these circumstances misform us. Being in the world will make us of the world in quite a few ways.

How do we respond to this? No one escapes this phenomenon entirely, and this perhaps is particularly the case for those called to remain as lay men and women. Even the best of circumstances will offer us a lot of good formation mixed with some ill. Ultimately, it is the idea that our growth in holiness is primarily our task that leads us to misread the situation and become frustrated.

While we avoid toxic circumstances and seek good ones, Advent reminds us that we otherwise must embrace many of the circumstances we find ourselves in, trusting that God’s graced work will do the heavy lifting in what otherwise seems to be an impossible task: the work of sanctification, of not being of the world, has got to be primarily lots of grace, along with our vigorous cooperation. A strange sort of escapism that misunderstands the universal call to holiness and reveals a lack of trust in God can be the result of missing this point in a world that continues to pose increasingly difficult moral challenges.

As we beg Christ to arrive more fully in our hearts this Advent, it is also worth considering that while the line from Corinthians quoted above applies most properly to the beatific vision, I think it also applies to our temporal life. Our own expectations for our future are always limited by our imperfect conceptions of what sort of life it would be good for us to lead.

Christ will always be eager to lead us beyond those into a future that, because unknown, can be frightening, but because prepared by Him, is better for us than we could have hoped. While we walk on the wavy seas of life, like Peter, if we keep our eyes trained on Him, He will lead us to places we never expected. In our vocational discernment, our prayer lives, and our moral lives, I think this is a good point to keep in mind.

Let us pray, this Advent, that the Lord may hasten His coming to the world and in our hearts.

Shaun Evans is a junior who studies theology, philosophy, and classics and lives in Stanford Hall. He is currently getting ready for a semester abroad in Rome, and you can reach him with wine recommendations at sevans5@nd.edu.