Sunday, December 1st is the First Sunday of Advent so I thought I would create a post with some reflections, meditations and books that focus on the theme of Advent.
Truly a great book on Advent is Advent of the Heart: Seasonal Sermons and Prison Writings by Alfred Delp, S.J., a German Jesuit priest who was imprisoned in Berlin in 1944, then tortured, imprisoned, and executed on February 2, 1945. Fr Delp's writtings and sermons always challenged us as he would say, "we are called to be 'shaken awake'; we are called to integrity and authenticity to confess and proclaim our faith; and we respond to God with reverent amen." Fr. Delp wrote:
Advent is precisely the liturgical season in which the interior religious tension of our time is most conspicuously revealed. ...In a reflection written in 1935, several years before being arrested, Fr. Delp directly addressed the increasing hostility toward "the original religious meaning of Advent."
The season of Advent is, first of all, the time of man's original religious instinct. Never will we experience our primeval homesick yearning for God more actively and alertly than in this season of ... Advent wreaths. Advent is the time of the God-seeker. The original longing within every human heart is a great impulse toward the hidden and distant God, a longing to wander in that far-off forgotten homeland of the soul. That longing is what the Church expresses, both in her inner attitude and in the liturgy of the season.
"Each one of us is confronted with new religious ideas in one form or another. It is not enough to be faithful within the privacy of your own heart or home. This is the moment for public, serious, and faithful profession of our faith."
Stay awake, so that you may be ready!
Father Albert Haase's book, Living the Lord's Prayer - The Way of the Disciple, is not on Advent however you might say it helps us prepare the way for it. He wrote:
Remember your suffering. It need not be in vain. It can become the womb of compassion.The womb is a place where something is in the process of being birthed - a place where something is formed. Fr Albert goes on to say,
Compassion makes us aware of who we truly are as it bonds us to others in relationships.Interestingly, the word religion is a derivation from the Latin word, re-ligare: meaning, "to bind back." As we are beings in and of and for relationships - and as we are always falling in and out of relationships, we, by nature, are religious beings forever in the process of patching ourselves back together. And so I was struck by how suffering works in all this and how compassion is the out-growth of suffering.
Richard Rohr, when lecturing on suffering and pain says; If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it. So at the point of suffering we have the breeding grounds of choice - either we are being transformed through our suffering or it is a source of transmitting the suffering on to others.
During the Advent season we are ever reminded of Our Lord and how He came to awaken in us a self-donating transformation of suffering in the world.
Oscar Wilde once remarked on suffering:
Jesus understood the leprosy of the leper,The darkness of the blind,The fierce misery of those who live for pleasure,The strange poverty of the rich, And the thirst that can make people drink from muddy water. He penetrated the outward shell of things and understood that whatever happens to another happens to oneself, and whatever happens to oneself happens to another.These words give us an image into our relatedness to one another. Embracing our sufferings as well as being with others during their sufferings is the beginning of the transformation of the world. It is the meaning of Advent. My friend and mentor, Gil Bailie, talked about entering into the biblical story this way:
In Seek That Which Is Above: Meditations Through the Year the future Pope Benedict XVI wrote:Jesus says, "take this cup," which is the cup of suffering. We don’t have to be melodramatic about it; there is suffering in our lives. The suffering that I should understand as redemptive is my suffering. The sufferings that I see other people undergoing I should not think that I am going to take it away, I won’t be able to, but I can be present with them in that suffering so they can feel that they are not alone in that suffering and perhaps feel the truth of the situation which is always, always, always that Christ is in it with them. They may not be able to experience that unless they know that I am in it with them. That act of being present with them may be their only entrée to the discovery that Christ is in it with them. Being in that suffering with others, and of course, that sometimes means helping to relieve the suffering, is our responsibility... (See link HERE to get the transcript of Gil's talk on Entering the Biblical Story.)
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by Rebekah Holten
Advent is a time when a kindness that is otherwise almost entirely forgotten is mobilized; namely, the willingness to think of others and give them a token of kindness. Finally Advent is a time when old customs live again, for instance, in the singing of carols which takes place all over the country. In the melodies and the words of these carols, something of the simplicity, imagination and glad strength of the faith of our forefathers makes itself heard in our age, bringing consolation and encouraging us perhaps to have another go at that faith which could make people so glad in such hard times.
There is no better time to enter the biblical story then now during Advent.
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