Long ago a friend taught me the difference between preparing and planning. Planning is what we tend to do this time of year: travel plans, meal plans, party plans. Planning is not bad and in fact to not plan ahead for known challenges is simply irresponsible (e.g. you can’t take a frozen turkey out the day you want to cook it for the feast!) Planning is being sure we maintain control of the situation, the schedule and the details of the process or event to ensure the outcome we want—ah, the perfect Christmas. (or is it?) In the process of making all the lists and checking them twice, I find myself having planned for the perfect Christmas, but being woefully unprepared for honoring the God-with-us, Emmanuel.

In the first week of the Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius emphasizes the importance of preparing oneself to pray each day. In fact, he offers a few directives for preparatory prayer, praying about praying. This is not planning in your mind a Santa Claus wish list of what I will pray for during my prayer time or how the prayer will move along. No, prepatory prayer is praying about that space, that opportunity, that moment that will shortly be upon me to be vulnerable to the Spirit of God. It is the petition for grace, that whatever takes place during my prayer time, whatever movements are churned in my soul, I will be open to faithfully respond. It is the reminder going into prayer that if I’m truly open to the Spirit working in and through me, I don’t know the outcome. I am not using prayer to reach some expected reward, my perfectly planned party as it might be, but rather to put myself at the disposal of God. It is that open, vulnerability to whatever may be, allowing the outcome to be out of my control, that differentiates preparing from planning.

And so too in Advent we have this chance to prepare for the moments of vulnerability before God that are about to be offered to us. These moments are there any other time of year, but are practically handed to us on a silver platter now. I’m not just talking about that time of contemplation at midnight mass when the lights are out and the silence is waiting to be shattered by bellows of “Joy to the World.” I’m talking about the moment when you give that nicely wrapped gift to my grandma, knowing it may be her last Christmas or look across the feast table to my sister, the one you argued with so vehemently growing up and yet secretly always admired. In that moment, the one that is usually glossed over with an “Oh, you shouldn’t have,” or an “I didn’t know what to get you,” you will have a space, a split second perhaps, to be vulnerable to God and those you are called to love. To look them in the eyes and say the words of love that God yearns to speak to them through you. To offer the intentional touch and strong hug that they so desperately need, but rarely get to feel. You can’t plan when it will happen or even exactly what you will say. You can’t know the outcome, or how they will react. But here in Advent is the time for that prepatory prayer; To seek the grace to overcome the awkwardness of those moments, to not shy away from them or gloss over them, to put whatever you do within those seconds of connection with another at the service and praise of the One being born.

Ah, now that would be the perfect Christmas.

Time is short. Those moments are coming. I’ve done a lot of planning, but am I prepared?

Photo: "Last Candle of Advent" by Bob Travis from Flickr (Used under Creative Commons license)

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