A familiar threshold arrives without fanfare, and vestigial whispers of truth we’d rather not hear surround us. The leaves have fallen, the light fades earlier each day, and creation itself seems to lean into dormancy. Everything passes. Everything changes. We are, each of us, contingent beings—our existence dependent on an unseen God beyond our control, yet not totally beyond our feeble comprehension (Acts 17:28, Ps. 91:1-4); our days numbered by a clock we can’t see.

We did not choose to be born (Ps. 139:13-16). We can’t choose to remain. The people we love age and change before our eyes. The moments we wish to preserve slip through our fingers like water. This is the human condition: to exist in a state of radical dependence (for many, that’s fairly unnerving), to be contingent rather than necessary, temporal rather than eternal.

And yet.

Within this fragile, fleeting existence burns something that refuses to accept transience as the final word. There is an ache in the human heart that no earthly thing can satisfy—a longing that persists even when we have everything we thought we wanted. We reach for permanence in a world of decay. We hunger for completion in a life of fragments. We yearn for a home we’ve never seen but somehow recognize.

“It is Jesus that you seek when you dream of happiness; He is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you; He is the beauty to which you are so attracted”

Pope St. John Paul II

This is the paradox Advent invites us to contemplate: we are dust, and to dust we shall return, yet we carry within us desires that point beyond dust. We are temporary beings with eternal longings. Contingent creatures who sense there must be something necessary. Finite minds that can conceive of infinity.

The great lie of our age is that we can anesthetize this ache through distraction, achievement, or accumulation. But the longing remains, surfacing in quiet moments—in the space between songs, in the silence after the party ends (or the pilgrimage), in the hours before dawn when we wake without knowing why.

Advent – the anticipation of the first coming of Christ – meets us in this tension. It doesn’t resolve it prematurely or offer cheap comfort. Instead, it names our condition honestly: we are waiting. We are incomplete. The world is broken, and so are we. But Advent transforms waiting from despair into hope. It suggests that our longing is not a flaw but a compass, not a wound but a promise. At least the transformation is offered; the wounds may bleed, but the salve (salvation) is an ongoing balm.

The coming we prepare for during Advent is not just a historical commemoration. Matthew’s Gospel informs us that the Babe who was born is named, ‘Immanuel’, meaning, “God with us” (Matt. 1:23). And God is not bound by time or place; therefore the Nativity of Christ is forever occuring in a way we truly can’t comprehend. And so Christ is the answer to every unfulfilled desire, every unhealed hurt, every incomplete story. He is the eternal breaking into the temporal, the necessary embracing the contingent, completion coming to meet incompletion.

We light candles in the darkness, one by one, watching their small flames push back the winter night. They won’t last forever—they too are transitory. But they point to a light that does not flicker or fade, to a presence that does not pass away, to a fulfillment that our hearts have always known must exist somewhere.

In this season, we’re invited not to deny our contingency – to do so would be an absurd attempt at denying our very existence – but to hold it alongside our longing. To be honest about both our fragility and our hunger for something more. To acknowledge that we are passing through this world, but we were made for another one—or rather, for the moment when heaven and earth finally become one.

The ache remains. But the Lord of Advent – for so Christ is – teaches us to interpret it rightly: not as evidence of life’s meaninglessness, but as the birth pangs of a completion yet to come (Rom. 8:19).