An Advent Dialogue with the Sick

In a reflection written over thirty years ago, Pope emeritus Benedict XVI expressed a remarkable solidarity with the sick and those who suffer. We offer some highlights of An Advent Dialogue with the Sick as a meditation during this time of preparation for Christ’s coming…

“When the quiet joy of the period before Christmas makes itself felt on every side, many factors can make it especially hard to be sick. The burden of sickness prevents us from truly sharing in the joy others feel. But perhaps Advent can nevertheless become a medicine of the soul that makes it easier to bear the enforced inaction and the pain of your illness. Indeed, perhaps Advent can help us discover the unobtrusive grace that can lie in the very fact of being sick.…

Just like a great joy, so too illness and suffering can be a very personal Advent of one’s own—a visit by the God who enters my life and wants to encounter me personally. Even when it is difficult for us, we should at least try to understand the days of our illness in this way: The Lord has interrupted my activity for a time in order to let me be still.…

May it now be the case that God is waiting for me in this stillness? May it not be the case that he is doing here what Jesus says in the parable of the vine: “Every branch that does bear fruit he prunes, that it may bear more fruit” (Jn I 5:2). If I learn to accept myself in these days of stillness, if I accept the pain, because the Lord is using it to purify me—does this not make me richer than if I had earned a lot of money? Has not something happened to me that is more durable and fruitful than all those things that can be counted and calculated?

A visit by the Lord—perhaps illness can present itself in a new light when we see it as a part of Advent … It can be a moment in our life that belongs to God, a time when we are open to him and thus learn to rediscover our own selves … The Lord is here. This Christian certainty is meant to help us look at the world with new eyes and to understand the “visitation” as a visit, as one way in which he can come to us and be close to us.”

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