“May
the Lord be generous in increasing your love.” That is a joyful prayer
from our second reading and seems a fitting start for the Church's new
year beginning this Advent Sunday. “May the Lord make you increase in
love and abound in love” is another way of putting it. The reading
continues: “May God our Father and the Lord Jesus strengthen your hearts
in holiness.” We have received the faith, and we have, in the cycle of
our years, tried to live out our faith. St Paul prays that the holiness
we have received and have tried to integrate into our adult lives will
be enlarged and strengthened. “Finally,” he adds, “we urge you in the
Lord Jesus to make more and more progress in the kind of life you are
meant to live and are already living.”
Christmas may be for children, but
Advent is for adults. It is a realistic time–a hopefully realistic
time–when we adult Christians have to admit, in these dismal winter
days, the shoddiness and second rate nature of much of our living as
Christians. In our on-going pilgrimage of faith and hope and love, all
three have flickered and faltered. There is one passage from the prophet
Isaiah, whose writings characterise this Advent season, which has a
definite autumnal and windy feel to it. “Our righteousnesses are as
filthy rags and we do fade as a leaf and our iniquities, like the wind,
carry us away.” Shorn of false righteousness before God as the winter
trees blasted by the winds. Advent is for adults.
But it is a hopeful season: not
optimistic, not trusting that matters will somehow turn out all right.
Rather a time to renew a passionate hope in God and in all that God
gives us in faith in order to live in hope and charity. Above all hoping
in the great Christmas gift of God, the Lord Jesus and the Holy Spirit
given to us by him. The world around us at the moment is a very dark
place: international tensions, economic crises, unemployment, floods at
home and civil collapse abroad. It is almost a picture of the
apocalyptic first reading for today's mass. But the brothers and sisters
of the Lord are called to be children of hope and faith and, above all,
charity. We are not to be submerged by anxiety, bowed down by despair.
“Hold your heads high”, the gospel tells us. “Stand erect”. Salt to the
earth and light to the world.
To acquire the resources to be children
of hope, or rather to integrate the graced strengths from our Master, it
is necessary for us to be “Awake”. “Wake up” is the Advent call. Wake
up and be prayerful at all times, pondering all these things in the
light of faith and hope and charity.
John the Baptist will be the dominant
character in these first weeks of Advent. He calls us to re-conversion
of life. Along with him, Isaiah the prophet will guide us, through his
poetry, to place ourselves within the vast providence of our heavenly
Father. We are to re-direct our ways and our thoughts into His ways and
His thoughts. The simplicity of today's psalm is our Advent prayer:
Lord, make me know your ways.
Lord teach me your paths.
Make me walk-in your truth, and teach me:
For you are God my saviour.....
The Lord's friendship is for those who revere him;
to them he reveals his covenant.
In our adult years since our baptism we
have tried to walk in his paths, stumbling, going astray, drifting off
course. Now is the time to re-enter the flow of his providence for us
and the world and to re-enter with joy the friendship he shares. “Be not
like horse and mule, unintelligent”, says the psalmist, “needing bridle
and bit.” It is not by coercion that we follow his ways but by leaving
behind the wrong paths more gracefully responding to the friendship he
shares, beginning in a manger. The animals are ahead of us: “the ox
knows its master and the donkey its master's crib.” We draw our courage
from the weakness of the child who is God with us.
(John Farrell O.P.torch.op.org:here)
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