There is a character, Rose of Sharon, in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath who is pregnant with her first child. As her impoverished family migrates from their native Oklahoma to California, Rose of Sharon’s all-consuming preoccupation is her unborn child. Everything she eats, every drink she lets pass her lips, every action she takes — none of it is done without thought for the child that is still so small as to make his mother’s expectancy barely discernible to the naked eye.

“For Rose of Sharon was pregnant,” wrote Steinbeck. “And the world was pregnant to her.”

It is the same for us Christians in the Advent season. We can feel a change coming, and the hope of this change consumes us. It shapes our actions and our plans, we feel it in our hearts and in our souls and in our limbs. From the food we eat to the clothing we wear to the words we use, the unseen Child lives and breathes and works in every small part of this blessed season.

Even the commercial clamor that is the secular “Christmas holiday” cannot fully distract us from the holy sense of anticipation we have. We are baptized, and so it is inside of us, this voice that cries out in the desert. When we hear it, we cannot help but listen.

The Virgin is pregnant, and the world is pregnant to us.

“We await new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells.” — 2 Peter 3:13