"It would seem to some that AIDS would appear to destroy love-destroy the journey to God, to holiness. The ravages of the immune system leave a person literally wasted away. AIDS isolates the person-all the more so because some would moralize infection as just desert. And this we would expect in American society where death is denied and homosexuality largely shunned. Love would thus appear to be undetectable where HIV is so detectable. However, such has not been the case. AIDS has in the last 10 - 15 years brought forth a love unsuspected because it was previously undetectable".

HIV/AIDS, observes Sullivan, freed gay persons, by necessity, from the denial of death. This made them free to look at whom they were. They were thus freed to live differently-and many of them did, turning from what were often fleeting affairs to abiding care for others in their dying. In turn, in living, as it were, beyond time, gay persons invited the rest of the world to live differently-and to an amazing extent they did, unexpectedly, remarkably turning to care for persons with AIDS, accepting them as gay and as dying, yet as lives deserving to be celebrated in full. Love, before undetectable, was in the time of AIDS, now detectable.

Advent, Sullivan has helped me to understand, is really a discipline learning to detect the undetectable. The suffering of the cross is undetectable in the vulnerability of the infant child. So holiness can become detectable in the midst of distress, as love increases and abounds in the midst of intolerance.

This is the deep miracle of Advent, at the heart of all holiday hospitality. This is what it means to be raised into God, into holiness. This is what God's reign looks like as it begins to be manifest - the Word being made flesh, revealing God's truth, incarnating grace.

Each time we celebrate Holy Eucharist, we do an Advent deed - we take ordinary bread for what it is, offer it up beyond control or calculation, and then give thanks that through it love hidden becomes manifest. Eucharist is an Advent event, bringing redemption and grace, unexpected, close as breath. Advent calls us to quiet preparation, to that vulnerability that makes our lives available to witness the unsuspected. In Advent we wait in anticipation of God being manifest in our very flesh, and dwelling among us...even love, before undetectable within and among us, now detectable.