All Saints’, Dorval
November 30, 2025
Late fourteenth-century ivory from the Met, depicting the Nativity and Crucifixion.
Noah entered the ark, and they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away.
If the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into.
Happy new church year!
Here we stand, again, on the precipice of Advent, and once again we are caught in a vortex of chaos and contradiction. Multiple overlapping timelines. A Day of the Lord which we are supposed to both longingly anticipate, and not even ask when it might come, because nobody knows. Soaring promises of peace and salvation, but also warnings of dire things – the sudden interruption of ordinary life, people being snatched away, traumatic experiences like flooding and home invasion. (And just wait until next week, when John the Baptist starts yelling at us to shape up!)
We are preparing for a holy birth, but we are also anticipating the end on many levels – the ends of our lives, the end of Jesus’ life, the end of all things. The secular world may be in full Christmas mode, but the traditional “Four Last Things” that the Church contemplates in Advent are Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell.
The longer I do the work of both a priest and a birth doula, the more I see deep connections between birth and death, between these two profound and unknowable transitions that usher us into and out of what the Advent collect calls “this mortal life.”
I have spent many hours watching by the bedsides of both those who are dying, and those who are giving birth. As we all know, both these passages are usually attended by great pain, as our bodies rearrange themselves to bring life into or out of the world. Sometimes we choose to bear all of that pain; sometimes we can use the blessings of medical science to alleviate at least some of it – but neither choice makes it easy. People birthing and people dying writhe, they moan, they cry out. (I suspect people being born may also be experiencing some pretty intense physical sensations, but of course they can’t really give us an accurate report.) People going through these transitions beg the people around them for help, and they utter desperate prayers to God.
Knowing the effort and pain and, very frequently, trauma, which attend these passages at the beginning and the end of life, inspires very real and understandable fear in those who have to go through them (which, in the case of death, will eventually be all of us). People preparing to give birth take enormous effort to prepare for the experience and try to make it as positive as possible. More of us should probably take the same approach to our death, but most of us are so scared of it that we try to avoid thinking about it at all, despite the progress that has been made in areas like hospice, to care for the dying person and the loved ones accompanying them.
At least with birth, we generally have a reasonable expectation of something good on the far side of the pain: a new baby human to cuddle and care for and love, a new family member who will delight us as they grow into the full self that God has created them to be. Death, on the other hand, is mysterious and therefore alarming; after Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead he failed to record anything about what it was like. But much about our faith teaches us that even if we can’t know what lies on the other side of the river of death, we should trust in the One who made us and brought us to birth, that there is also far more joy than we can imagine on the far side of death.
Certainly, in Advent, everything seems to be urging us to see birth and death as parallel: a profound, anticipated but still unscheduled, disruption to the status quo, which entails grueling effort and powerful sensations – probably amounting to pain – in the short term, but on the far side of which lies something far greater than we can imagine.
You can see where I’m going with this. If this is the Advent pattern, then it’s very probable that it also applies to the end of the days, the coming of the Son of Man, whatever name you want to use for the time of change and upheaval that Jesus is telling his followers to be prepared for. It may not be predictable; it may demand that we prepare as best we can for a daunting, intense experience that will still inevitably surprise us, but on the far side we can be assured of a whole new wonderful world.
For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers, says Paul. Once you’ve embarked on the hard and draining work of transformation, the only way out is through. If it is someone’s time to be born or to die, there is no way to halt that process once it has started, no matter what else is happening nearby. But likewise, every spasm, every breath, brings you closer to the end of the suffering and the beginning of the new life.
In days to come the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains … all the nations shall stream to it … they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.
The glorious vision is there. On the other side of the pain is the promise. The hard part just has to be gotten through, and then the new life can begin.
When I teach childbirth preparation, the central focus is on mindfulness – learning to be present with the sensations in our own bodies and minds, to embrace whatever is happening in the moment, not trying to make it be different, with openness and curiosity. It’s a powerful model and honestly one I wish I had had access to when I went through labour myself. It’s a valuable approach to any time when our bodies are experiencing big sensations that are largely out of our control – up to and including the tremendous changes that we will experience as we surrender ourselves, at the end of our lives, into the waiting embrace of the one who made us.
And it is also a solid strategy in Advent. The Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour, and we do not know what kind of upheavals will accompany that coming. But we know that whatever the experience will be like, God will be in it; God will reveal God’s self to us in the midst of it. The best we can do is not to panic or tense up, but take a deep breath, and meet whatever happens with compassion and curiosity.
Birth, death, the end of all things – they are big changes, and they will challenge and transform us. But with God’s help, on the other side of the part that hurts and scares us, there is good news, and new life.
Amen.
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