Advent: The Season of Annunciations

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Stephanie Saldaña is a writer who lives with her husband, a Syriac Catholic priest, and their family in Bethlehem. In a recent article published by Commonweal (“We Must Celebrate Well” Nov. 25, 2025) Saldaña captures the present reality of the Holy Land poignantly as she recounts what she is reflecting on as she wanders about the town of Jesus’s birth. Saldaña’s husband works as a parish priest to a Syrian Catholic community in Bethlehem. When Saldaña was becoming familiar with the Syriac faith, she learned that in this faith, Advent is known as the period of ‘annunciations.’ A faithful follower would pause and reflect during Advent on the Annunciation to Mary, then the announcement of Gabriel to Zachary about the son his wife was to bear (St. John the Baptist), then the announcement Gabriel makes to Joseph in a dream assuring him of Mary’s legitimate pregnancy. “We’re not asked just to wait,” says Saldaña, “but to pay attention, look, and believe.” As she pays attention and looks around her, Saldaña is saddened to see that people who once enjoyed making a living off tourism, now hang on to “a fragile hope that pilgrims might finally begin to return.” She recounts the devastation in Gaza and the horrors endured by Israeli hostages but there is a slight glimmer of hope as the Mayor of Bethlehem announced the return of The Christmas Tree to Manger Square on December 6, adding in his speech, “The unbreakable message that light is stronger than darkness, and love is stronger than fear.”

All through life there are little ‘annunciations’ that we take for granted. Sometimes they are simple graces that penetrate our obliviousness to God’s efforts to ‘get through’ to us. Saldaña calls these “annunciations along the way.” They are unexpected. They are acted in love and recognized through grace. Perhaps we could also call them ‘interruptions of grace.’ Examples might be that you suddenly catch sight of someone lighting candles in a church, as did Saldaña, and an ether of holiness rises as you see lips murmuring a prayer. Or someone offers to carry a person’s grocery bags to her car. Or a young child is begging her mother for something as they hurry to their car in a parking lot. You watch as the mother gives the child something and the child runs back to the Salvation Army Santa at the entrance of the store and drops a donation into his bucket. She squeals with delight and skips back to her mom. These are little ‘annunciations’ alerting you to the unfathomable working of grace in human life. They are interruptions because they grabbed your attention, like sudden breaks of light in our darkened environment. The question is, ‘what do they say to you?’ 

Reflection

I think constantly of the Holy Land these days where I spent two weeks in September 2022. I look at the map of that tortured part of the world and pause for every place, city, site we visited which I have carefully marked, and I pray. I pray for peace. I pray that citizens of Israel and Palestine are brought to a peace that fosters life, security, and a deep faith in our loving God. Grace can penetrate even the most stubborn designs, the architecture of powers that govern in personal, political interests rather than the needs of the people. Grace can crack any edifice of revenge; it can level selfish monuments of authority. It is the only way a suffering God can speak for a suffering people. Like Saldaña, I’m watching for and praying for grace in the Holy Land and Palestine, this Advent. But it takes believers like us to recognize it and support it. So, let’s try to appeal each day for grace to be accepted by leaders in Israel and Palestine, Russia, and Ukraine, and the United States.

In this effort we might want to observe the ‘annunciations,’ the moments of ‘interruptions of grace’ that happen in our own lives on a daily basis. Ask God for the awareness to ‘pay attention, to look and to believe’ what we see that could be an ‘interruption of grace,’ an ‘annunciation’ of God coming to earth to be one with us simply because He loves us.

While reflecting on ‘annunciations,’ some of you may wish to read Caryll Houselander’s classic, The Reed of God, an advent book centered on Mary and her preparedness for the coming of her Son. The book is a bit dated but so is The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Works of William Shakespeare, and a pantheon of classical works! Houselander describes finding Christ among the fearful citizens of London during the bombing raids of WWII. Every page of this book serves as a meditation of God’s great love and wisdom in choosing Mary as the Mother of Christ. I’ll close sharing only one such meditation because it is so relevant to today:

“In country after country starvation is setting in or increasing. Children lie down quietly in streets. Knowing with a terrible wisdom, that the end has come, they pull their rags around their starved bodies and compose themselves to die.

In the face of all this I sit here in a bombed city and say that because a girl surrendered herself to God two thousand years ago, human nature can be constantly new; life always young; and everyone bring not death into the world but the miraculous life of the Spirit: everyone a bearer of Christ into the world.”  The Reed of God by Caryll Houselander, New York: Sheed and Ward, 1944, p. 68.

Blessed Advent to each of you, my dear readers, and my Anonymous Angels.