Advent readings are filled with hope, but also with warnings about what is coming, a doom we cannot grasp. One shall be taken, and one shall be left. Judgement is upon us; as in horror movies, real violence is about to irrupt into our daily round of manageable, pettifogging wickedness…. Foreboding looks backward too, at the old evil at the root, in fear that it will catch up with us. But at the end of all those warnings, of long nights lighting candles against the shadows of old sins and praying for deliverance from old enemies, is Christmas, the simultaneous end and reversal of spooky season.

A fate we could not foresee or even comprehend has already come upon us, and it was our tiny wriggling salvation.