Ortus Christi: Meditations for Advent

by Mother St. Paul

(4) By the holiness of his mother and his home. His mother taught by the Holy Spirit was the first to recognize Our Lady as the Mother of God; she was saluted by Our Lady and ministered to by her. She had the unspeakable privilege of having Our Lady with the blessed Fruit of her womb Jesus living under her roof for three months. A home where the Mother of God was welcomed and honoured—such was the home God chose for the Precursor of His Son.

Point II. The Preparation after his birth.

"There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. This man came to bear witness of the Light, to prepare unto the Lord a perfect people." (The "Gradual" for the Vigil of St. John the Baptist). The Feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist is a Double of the First Class with an Octave, for Mary and her Son were present at his birth and he was "great before the Lord."

The eighth day was the day of circumcision and the naming day. Everybody naturally was calling him Zachary, but his mother who knew from her husband that the name was fixed, said: "Not so, but he shall be called John." They would not have it and appealed by signs to the deaf and dumb father, who wrote: "John is his name," for "he was so named of the angel before he was conceived." At that moment Zachary's penance came to an end and "he spoke blessing God." This fresh miracle was soon "noised abroad" and the people asked in fear: "What an one, think ye, shall this child be?" Zachary, "filled with the Holy Ghost," used his loosed tongue to sing his beautiful hymn of praise to God who had remembered His holy testament, and had allowed "the Orient from on high" to visit them. And then addressing his little son, he said: "And thou child shalt be called the prophet of the Highest, for thou shalt go before the face of the Lord to prepare His ways."

He began to "prepare His ways" by a life of hardship, solitude and penance, having no fixed home, living on what he could find in the deserts—locusts and wild honey, and wearing as a garment camels' hair with a leathern girdle. Tradition tells us he began all this at a very early age and he continued it "until the day of his manifestation to Israel," that is, until the day he left his solitude and began to preach—nearly thirty years later. He had thirty years' preparation for his life's work, like Him whose way he was preparing, and he was preparing it no less as a solitary in the deserts than as the great preacher of penance by the Jordan.

What lessons can we learn for our own preparation for the Coming of Christ this Advent?

1. That because we are going to be amongst those who in some way or other "prepare His ways," God has occupied Himself with our preparation even before we were born. Either by surrounding us with good, or by bringing good out of evil or by some of His many ways which are not our ways, He has had a hand in all that concerns us. We have first firmly to believe this, and secondly to co-operate with all God's designs for us, as John did.

2. That if we would prepare the ways of Christ we must be familiar with His Mother, accustomed to receiving her salutations and to returning them. That we must have her to live with us and take an interest in all that concerns us. Who could better help us to prepare for the Coming of her Son than His own Mother?

3. That we must be filled with the Holy Spirit and never turn Him out of our hearts by sin. It would be useless to try to prepare the way for Christ if we had not the co-operation of the Holy Spirit.

4. That penance in one form or another must have a share in our preparation for the Coming of Christ. All we know of John from the time of his infancy till he began his mission is that "he was in the deserts." It was not that he preferred such a life, but he felt that it was the one most suited to his own preparation for the Messias, for during those long years in the deserts he was preparing the way of Christ in his own heart; during his mission he prepared it in the hearts of others. Solitude, fasting, lack of ease and comfort, coarse clothing—these were the allies which John chose to aid him in his preparation for the Coming of the King, for His "Kingdom is not of this world" and "the weapons of our warfare are not carnal" (2 Cor. x. 4). He was consecrated to God, and he separated himself from everything that might interfere with his entire consecration.