Tuesday, Advent Week 1

"The Church asks us to understand that Christ, who came once in flesh, is prepared to come again. When we remove all obstacles to his presence he will come, at any hour and moment, to dwell spirtually in our hearts, bringing with him the riches of his grace."
St Charles Borromeo

Maranatha

Maranatha! Come, Lord Jesus!
Help us to be ready for you...to see you and love you in the circumstances of our lives, in the people who surround us. Help us to be ready to give you whatever You ask, whatever you need of our poor treasures to enrich the poor....whatever you need of our lives and energies to bring hope to the hopeless.
Maranatha! Come, Lord Jesus!

First Sunday of Advent

"Expectation - anxious, collective and operative expectaion of an end of the world, that is to say, of an issue for the world - that is the supreme Christian function and the most distinctive characteristic of our religion.

Historically speaking, that expectation has never ceased to guide the progress of our faith like a torch ... We persist in saying that we keep vigil in expectation of the Master. But in reality we should have to admit, if we are sincere, that we no longer expect anything. The flame must be revived at all costs. At all costs we must renew in ourselves the desire and the hope for the great coming. But where are we to look for the source of this rejuvenation? From the perception of a more intimate connection between the victory of Christ and the outcome of the work which our human effort here below is seeking to construct."

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Father in heaven,
our hearts desire the warmth of your love
and our minds are searching for the light of your Word.
Increase our longing for Christ our Saviour
and give us the strength to grow in love,
that the dawn of his coming
may find us rejoicing in his presence
and welcoming the light of his truth.

We ask this in the name of Jesus the Lord. Amen.

Opening Prayer - First Sunday of Advent
The Roman Missal

Avent - Maranatha ~ Come Lord Jesus

Tell the timid to take heart.
The Lord our God will come!
Monastic Liturgy

The Advent is one of my favourite seasons of the Church year. I love it. Advent is like a roller-coaster ride. We begin this season looking towards a new age of revelation when Christ will come again in glory. The language of the liturgy is geared towards the 'end times'. There are warnings and there is consolation. We end Advent with memory - remembering the awesome way God takes flesh and lives among us.

Advent is about hope, desire, aching emptiness and sheer unsophisticated, overwhelming joy! Let us take some time in these coming weeks to be attentive to our need for God and expectant that God will meet us in our need.

Dorothy Day

Today is the 27th anniversary of the death of Dorothy Day. Dorothy was the founder of the Catholic worker movement. A woman who saw in the face of the poor the challenge of God to listen to him. We often think of prayer as something that we do rather than a waiting and an attentivenes to God. This attentiveness is towards God both visible - manifest around us in the lives of people and situations - and invisible, the waiting, often in darkness, for hope and presence.

Dorothy was an ardent defender of people's rights. She continued to speak up for the unprotected when no one else would do that. During World War II, her protests about the internment of Japanese Americans without due process, caused J Edgar Hoover to open his extensive file on her. She fed the poor, which may not be the Christian's final task, but should normally be the first one.

She was the long distance runner of protest in our time, because her agitation was built on serenity, her activism on contemplation, her earthly indigantion on unearthly trust. This or that cause, with its noisy followers, came and went, but she was always there. She showed us that people who stand for others cannot act from a calculus of individual advantage. They must act as they do from a higher urgency, a love beyond what most of us think as loving. So far from distracting them from earth's injustice, as Marx claimed religion did, Dorothy Day's faith made effective radicalism not only possibe , for many people, but imperative. We may not even be able to possess the earth unless we aspire to heaven - like our sister, who is dead and lives.
Garry Wills, The Outsider Column, 1980

Preparing for Advent

Apologies for the time away from the blog. I will try to be more faithful.

In these days we prepare for the great season of Advent.

"Advent is the time for rousing. We are shaken to the very depths, so that we may wake up to the truth of ourselves. The primary condition for a fruitful and rewarding Advent is renunciation, surrender. We must let go of all our mistaken dreams, our conceited poses and arrogant gestures, all the pretences with which we hope to deceive ourselves and others. if we fail to do this, stark reality may take hold of us and rouse us forcibly in a way that will entail both anxiety and suffering"
Alfred Delp

Transfiguration

"One of the things I love about the story of the Transfiguration is that it is crammed with so much meaning. The fulfillment of the law and the prophets in Jesus Christ; the call to glory for the apostles and subsequently for each of us; the poignant truth that the glory Moses beheld at Sinai and the the glory Elijah knew in the still, small voice they suddenly saw on the mount of Transfiguration.

There was the shekinah--it was hidden in the face of the Man from Galilee. There was the still, small voice of Love. It was hidden in the humble itinerant preacher...born as Man, born of a woman.

All of this, but what hit me at Mass today was the beauty of it all taking place a mountaintop. In every culture and religion the mountains are the dwelling places of the gods. It makes sense that to get as close as we can to heaven we ought to go up where heaven and earth are met.

And when we do get there, we feel cut off from this world. We feel closer to God. We look down on the earth below and begin to see things a little bit more from his perspective. The other thing hammered home to me is that the mountain is also a picture of the spiritual life.

It's a long, hard climb, this spiritual life. It's the hardest task anyone can possible set himself or herself--to become a saint. Why is it that when we set out to climb a mountain we prepare for hardship; we train; we get expert advice; we study the trail and we expect difficulties, but when we set out on the spiritual journey we pretend we're taking a walk in the park?

The spiritual quest is a long, hard and perilous journey, there is danger and sacrifice, but there is also fellowship, the reward of a new perspective, and finally, a glory that is unimaginable in its splendor."

Rev. Dwight Longnecker