Advent summons us to the beginning. The lavishness of God's compassion and mercy frame yet another year for us. With the arrival of Advent's first Sunday, we attend to this mystery one more time.

... Our Christian tradition proclaims this as both an event already accomplished in human history and an event moving toward fulfillment in the future -- our future.

Our worship, fashioned of word and sacrament, insists that our encounter with the day of the Lord occurs concretely in the struggles and tensions, choices and decisions of human living.

We welcome this introductory message from the book Advent, edited by Thomas J. O'Gorman. And we join with O'Gorman in offering this invitation to "lift up this season of readiness for the advent of God in our living."

Preparing for Advent

As we approach Advent, let us contemplate T.S. Elliot's poem that captures the tensions that help us reset for a renewed season of worship.

Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and moving
into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise.
In my end is my beginning.

 

Advent Reflections based on the poem Christ-Light by Mary Ann Barrett OP

Advent Week 1

Advent Week 2

Advent Week 3

Advent Week 4