Fifteen.

Smallness.

"The Jesus "who did not cling to being God," but is like us in all things, models what most of us take the greater part of our lives to learn: how to "be ourselves." The divinity who comes to us as an infant is the paradigm of what it means to learn from life as we grow into who and what we're meant to be. The God who comes without retinue or riches is the metaphor of a humility that requires us to remember how really small we are in the universe--and to come to the point where that is enough for us.

Advent is about the power of emptiness and the spiritual meaning of smallness.
When we have little to begin with, we have even less to lose. We know, then, that we don't have all the ideas or all of the answers. It means that we have nothing to fight over and even less to boast about in life. We become full of possibility.

When we know who we really are, when we present no disguises and parade no pretensions, when we are honest both with ourselves and with others, we fired ourselves free to be ourselves. We have no image to keep up, no lies to gild in a gilded society. We become full of integrity."
~Sister Joan Chittister, OSB
(Read the rest of the article here.)