Advent Antiphon: O Emmanuel

"O come, O come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel

that mourns in lonely exile here, until the Son of God appear."

On the way to work this morning I took local roads in order to tank up the car, and then I decided to stop at a deli en route to the office to buy a bagel and coffee. I could have got free coffee in the kitchen at work, and it wasn't as if I were really famished for a bagel. But there's a particularly nice man who runs this deli, and two days before Christmas, stopping in there seemed the appropriate thing to do.
    And sure enough, there was the lovely smiling man who buttered my everything bagel and poured my French vanilla coffee.  I told him why I had stopped in, and he smiled even more and was ever so pleased. We wished each other a Merry Christmas.
    Perhaps four, five times at most in my life, I've stopped in this deli on the way to work and my life seems richer for having encountered this man.
    Today we ask Christ under the name Emmanuel to come and visit his people. Emmanuel means "God with us." This is the central meaning of the incarnation, that God has come down and (as John's Gospel says) pitched his tent among us. It's not a God who peers down at us "from a distance," as the popular song says, but one who is right here among us, in the midst of our human condition.  Perhaps in the beauty or sublimity of the natural world, as poet Gerard Manley Hopkins loved to tell us. Or in the love of a friend.  Perhaps in a homeless person we meet on the street. Or in the smile of a man behind a deli counter.
    In what ways is God-with-you?