For several years, I have been providing spiritual direction one day a month at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Panama City. It is my custom to have some simple item, a candle, an icon, a stone, resting on a candle stand between us as a possible focus for reflection. This month, I used a statue of Mary, tall and thin, hands clasped in prayer, eyes downcast, as a model of our Advent waiting. The table was covered with a blue cloth—blue is Mary’s traditional color, and blue represents the Advent season—and a lighted votive candle stood at her feet.

As we await our celebration of Christ Jesus’ birth and his coming again in glory, we can learn from Mary’s waiting stance. She waited the long months of her pregnancy before the birth of Jesus. She waited the thirty years of his preparation for public ministry. She waited at the foot of the cross with the beloved disciple. She waited with the disciples in Jerusalem for the baptism of the Holy Spirit, faithful and persevering through it all.

Mary’s waiting, however, was not a passive waiting. In our gospel lesson for today, we see that, during her pregnancy, she hurried to the side of her cousin Elizabeth, who was carrying the babe we have come to know as John the Baptist. In the years of Jesus’ preparation, she was busy raising her family, Jesus, his brothers, James, Joses, Jude and Simon, and his sisters (Mk.6:3). At the foot of the cross, she kept vigil, famously memorialized in icon and in Michelangelo’s Pieta as she received Jesus’ broken body into her arms. And after Jesus’ ascension, she and his brothers joined the twelve in “constantly devoting themselves in prayer” (Acts 1:14) as they awaited their empowerment on Pentecost.

Just as Jesus was “about [his] Father’s business” (Lk.2:49 KJV), doing God’s will as the writer to the Hebrews tells us, so was Mary in her very different circumstances. That is our Advent call, to ready ourselves in our waiting to live into the perfect will of God.