2nd Sunday of Advent --Pastor's Reflection

Advent, the season of beginnings, is a prayerful time of year as we examine our relationship with the Lord and others around us as we ponder the coming of God’s Son into our lives. However, our prayerful ponderings may  often disrupted by last-minute shopping, holiday preparations, anxieties about the future and the fears, discouragement and concerns surrounding the continuing Pandemic with its restrictions or interruptions. Sometimes we experience a season of joy as a season of stress.  In Latin,   Adventus means the coming or the presence – persons in ancient time believed its meaning to  be the coming of someone in high office, king, Emperor. For Christians, the meaning of Adventus was transformed into the coming of the Lord and His presence among us. Advent is a time of expectant hope, when we look to the future and the past in order to focus on the present. God is in our midst.
 
To appreciate the richness of this season of hope, we are to remember that the Lord keeps His promises. In the time of the prophets, God promised that He would send His Son Who would bring goodness, peace and love into the world by His giving of Self. This personal and loving Creator would definitively save faithful people from the forces not of God, by making all things new. As we anticipate Jesus’ birth, we anticipate and participate in our rebirth.  
 
And how do we approach Our Lord for renewal and rebirth? Thomas Merton can be our guide during Advent and how to understand this beautiful time. He was a mystic, monk, and spiritual writer in the 20^th century. Merton spent a period of three semesters, from the fall of 1940 to December 1941, teaching at St. Bonaventure University. In his writings, he states that Advent is a mystery. He believes that it is a mystery of emptiness. Jesus came, incarnated as human, to those most in need, all of us in some way broken in our humanity.  He came for those who are suffering, the most unfortunate, the sinful, those that feel empty. The Advent mystery is then a mystery of emptiness, like the empty crib of poverty, of limitation. We can all be likened to the empty crib, the manager, that the Divine infant fills up with His love, His goodness and His Salvation. In anticipation of the Lord filling up the empty crib, we await Him and anticipate Him with Hope, we await new beginnings, Hope for renewal and rebirth.
 
This Advent, in this mystery, let us discover the emptiness that exists. Let us ask the Lord to fill us with His Divine by completing us in His joy in the coming of the new. Let us make this prayerful time, a sacred time, and allow the mystery of Advent to be revealed. Let us open our minds, hearts and souls to the mystery and allow it to become a reality, a reality of HOPE, a reality of LOVE!

Fr. John