Category: Advent/Christmas

The Lord comes to our wilderness

The Lord will manifest His glory in the wilderness.

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Sr. Dorcee, beloved1 Comment

I always find great hope in this first paragraph of the second reading from this past Sunday’s Office of Readings.  The reason I find it so hopeful is because in it Eusebius proclaims that the glory of the Lord will appear in the wilderness, not in Jerusalem.  Because most of my prayer these days consists in loving Christ in the darkness and the wilderness of my own life, it is a great consolation to know that that is exactly where Christ will manifest His glory.  Be heartened if you, too, experience a wilderness, a trackless waste, somewhere in your life.  “It is there that the glory of the Lord is to appear.”

The voice of one crying in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight the paths of our God.  The prophecy makes clear that it is to be fulfilled, not in Jerusalem but in the wilderness: it is there that the glory of the Lord is to appear, and God’s salvation made known to all mankind.  (Eusebius of Caesarea)

When Israel went out of Egypt

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The poem for today may not strike you immediately as a poem for Advent, but as you read it, I think you’ll see why I chose it.  It’s a poem I just came across by one of my favorite writers, Anthony Esolen, who just this past week posted it to Touchstone’s blog. Here’s the link, and I do hope that you savor and relish it as much as I did upon reading it.  Let’s never go back to Egypt . . .

Found by God

Sr. Dorcee, beloved2 Comments

Continuing on from yesterday’s post . . .  Our journey to God is so much like that of the prodigal son’s.  We start to turn home-ward, only to find that God is already there, coming to us.  The sheep gets lost, and the Shepherd goes out to find it–sometimes even before the sheep realizes that it is lost.

As we are searching for God, the good news is that God is searching for us.  Better yet, he has found us.  The great question is not whether we have found God but whether we have found ourselves being found by God.  God is not lost.  We were, or, as the case may be, we are. . . . Here is what St. Paul says: “It is full time now for you to wake from sleep.”  He is telling us to wake up the gift already given.  This season of the Church’s calendar is called Advent, which means “coming”.  Christ came, Christ comes, Christ will come again.  There is no time–past, present, or future–in which Jesus the Christ is not God with us.  He was with you yesterday, is with you today, and will be with you tomorrow.  So we are invited to give up our searching and let ourselves be found by the One who wants to be with us, and to have us with him, forever.    (Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, God With Us, pp. 18-19)

The search for God

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One of the books I’m reading, actually re-reading, this Advent, is a book of a nondescript name with an unattractive cover: The Roots of Christian Mysticism,  by Olivier Clement, one of the foremost Orthodox theologians of our day.  What I love about the book is the way Clement brings together quote after quote from ancient authors with his brilliant commentary interspersed.  This past week I have been re-reading the first three chapters.  The second is entitled “God, Hidden and Universal”.  Clement is trying to communicate how utterly inaccessible God in His essence is to us.  Of course, this concept–which, of course, we cannot fully grasp–is essential to understanding the inexpressible love of God for us in becoming man.  However, instead of quoting from his book :-), I am going to quote the late Fr. Richard John  Neuhaus (from First Things)  from another book, God With Us, an Advent-Christmas book put out by Paraclete Press.

We are all searching, and ultimately–whether we know it or not–we are searching for God.  Ultimately, we are searching for the Ultimate, and the Ultimate is God.  It is not easy, searching for God . . .  The fact is that we do not really know what we’re looking for or who we’re looking for.  Almost a thousand years ago, St. Anselm of Canterbury said, “God is that greater than which cannot be thought.”
      Think about it.  We can stretch our minds as high and deep and far as our minds can stretch, and at the point of the highest, deepest, farthest stretch of our minds, we have not “thought” God.  There is always a thought beyond which we cannot think.  “God is that greater than which cannot be thought.
      God is, literally, inconceivable.  And that is why God was conceived as a human being in the womb of the Virgin Mary.  Because we cannot, even in thought, rise up to God, God stooped down to us in Jesus, who is “Emmanuel,” which means “God with us.”

I will continue with this tomorrow.

Waiting

Sr. Dorcee, beloved2 Comments

This Advent morning I have been pondering the idea, the posture of “waiting.”  What does it mean to wait for the Lord’s coming?  To wait in hope?  I haven’t formulated all my thoughts yet, but one thing that rings true to me about waiting is something that Pope Benedict talked about in his general audience yesterday.  In the context of speaking about St. William of Saint-Thierry (a good friend of St. Bernard of Clairvaux), he wrote: “Human nature, in its most profound essence, consists in loving.  In a word, only one task is entrusted to every human being: to learn to will the good, to love, sincerely, authentically, freely.  However, only at the school of God can this task be accomplished and man can attain the end for which he was created.” 

What struck me was that there is a link between loving and waiting.  If I put all my energy into loving–loving God, receiving His love, loving others as I am loved–then I will indeed be “actively” waiting, actively preparing for His coming.  What better thing could I do than that to prepare for Him who is Love itself?

“An interior diary”

Sr. Dorcee, beloved1 Comment

Perhaps many of you have already read Pope Benedict’s homily from First Vespers this past Sunday, but I wanted to draw your attention particularly to this part and encourage you to try to do what he suggests for Advent:

Advent, this intense liturgical time that we are beginning, invites us to pause in silence to grasp a presence. It is an invitation to understand that every event of the day is a gesture that God directs to us, sign of the care he has for each one of us. How many times God makes us perceive something of his love! To have, so to speak, an “interior diary” of this love would be a beautiful and salutary task for our life! Advent invites and stimulates us to contemplate the Lord who is present. Should not the certainty of his presence help us to see the world with different eyes? Should it not help us to see our whole existence as a “visit,” as a way in which he can come to us and be close to us, in each situation?

You can read the entire address here.  (It is worth reading.)  Do try to take some time daily to take note in your “interior diary” of how God has loved you.  (This will remind some of you of Fr. Gallagher’s talks on the examen.) And know that we all wouldn’t mind your sharing an entry or two here as a comment.

“Mary-darkness, faith’s walled place”

Sr. Dorcee, beloved2 Comments

This Sunday’s poem is one by Jessica Powers, written in 1948:

Advent

I live my Advent in the womb of Mary.
And on one night when a great star swings free
from its high mooring and walks down the sky
to be the dot above the Christus i,
I shall be born of her by blessed grace.
I wait in Mary-darkness, faith’s walled place,
with hope’s expectance of nativity.

I knew for long she carried me and fed me,
guarded and loved me, though I could not see.
But only now, with inward jubilee,
I come upon earth’s most amazing knowledge:
someone is hidden in this dark with me.

               ~Jessica Powers, The Selected Poetry of Jessica Powers, p. 81.