by Bryan Manning, SJ
Advent is a season of listening, waiting and responding, a holy tension between promise and fulfilment. It is the Church’s long inhale before the Incarnation, the stillness before God moves again in flesh. Like Mary, Joseph and the prophets, we stand poised between fear and trust, invited to say yes to a God who continues to come into the world through our fragile lives. In this way, Advent and vocation are inseparable: Each authentic calling is an echo of the first Annunciation, a space where God desires to dwell among us.
Nowhere have I felt this Advent paradox more deeply than here, as a Jesuit scholastic serving as a jail chaplain in Regina. The men I accompany, especially those in remand, know waiting more intimately than most. They wait for sentencing, for programmes, for visits, for resolution. They also wait in a wider, more spiritual sense: suspended between who they have been and who they might yet become. Innocent until proven guilty, many endure months and even years of profound unknowing, living in a crucible of anxiety, despair, boredom, anger and aching loneliness. Yet within that crucible, something sacred stirs.
One man told me that lockdown (a period of confinement to inmates’ cells for security reasons) felt like a retreat — a time to pray, read and rest undisturbed. For others, it becomes a raw space of introspection: promises remembered and broken, regrets named, the question of God rising from the cracks of despair. In such moments, Advent reveals its hidden face. The jail becomes not only a place of penance (let us remember the root of the word penitentiary here) but a wilderness where conversion is possible, where the Greek hamartia — missing the mark — is recognized and the way of light slowly remembered. Memories of the coming Christ are stirred.
As Advent approached, I felt drawn to the writings of Jesuit martyr Alfred Delp, who penned sermons from his Nazi prison cell before his execution. Delp understood what it meant to wait for Christ in chains, to hear God’s call in silence and shadow. He wrote of vocation as “comprehending and fulfilling the vocation of a grain of wheat, this call to be poured out extravagantly, to be sacrificed to give of oneself even unto death, to shine a light from one’s very substance for the benefit of others.”[1] Delp’s vision speaks to the brokenness and hunger for redemption of incarcerated men. But more broadly, he captures the kenotic nature of all vocations — to pour oneself out fully, being refilled with the illuminated Christ, so that others may witness it.
There are no atheists in jail, someone once told me. I have seen men ask to pray the Rosary, quote Scripture, and debate theology with sincerity and depth. One night, walking through the jail yard, I noticed how the razor wire atop the fences shimmered under the guard tower’s spotlight. It reminded me of moonlight shining on the tinplate steeples and spires of Quebec churches. And for a moment, the jail appeared like a strange cathedral — crowded with congregants waiting for mercy, aching for light, awaiting the Word.
And is this not Advent? Christ coming quietly into locked cells, trembling hearts and forgotten lives. Lumen ad revelationem gentium — light to enlighten the nations. Vocation, here and everywhere, is the courage to believe that even behind bars, even in shame and failure, God still calls, still waits, still entrusts us with the miracle of his coming. Each small “yes,” offered in darkness, allows the Incarnation to take flesh again — even where the world least expects it.
[1] Alfred Delp, Advent of the Heart: Seasonal Sermons and Prison Writings 1941–1944, trans. Theodore Wiesner (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006), 19.
