"All is futility, all is futility," says the author of Ecclesiastes, "all is futility."  Is he correct?  Indeed, he is.  We come, we go, and we never return.  Likewise, although it will be around for much longer than we, the world comes, too, birthing us, amazing us, then folding in on us, letting us go, now and forever.  And one day, the world will be gone, too.

     Then what will anything matter?  Yesterday, I wrote about way that Advent preserves and sustains memory, how, in a world in which, to quote Ecclesiastes again, "there is nothing new under the sun," Advent ensures that what is gone will always be with us, living still.  And all the lonely people of whom I wrote a few days ago will not die unheeded and unknown.  In Advent, God, a living God, an eternal God of dynamic presence, demonstrates to us that even if the world appears futile, it is not.  Nor are we.
     Why else would God come?  Beyond the mutability of quotidian affair, beyond the futility of the ordinary and mundane, Advent affirms the absolute worth of everything we do.  And are.