Thoughts on Advent

 

The Quiet Joy of Advent

The season of Advent can be overlooked in the run-up to Christmas, but if we take the time to recognize its hum beneath the busyness of shopping, baking, parties, and decorations, we discover the quiet joy it can bring, those moments apart from the giddiness (or the frustration) of December. Even people who work in ministry can get caught up in the preparations for the Advent and Christmas liturgies and lose sight of the deep joy of the season. Advent challenges us to step away from the hectic activity of the world, even if only for a short time each day. Pope Francis is the perfect guide through this season. Not one to shy away from a busy schedule, he has discovered the secret of balancing work with reflection, busyness with quiet contemplation, celebration with solitude, simplicity with the complexities of daily life. And what is at the heart of that secret? Making sure everything is rooted in Christ. The work we do (and the joy it can bring) emerges from a commitment to bringing the gift of God’s love to those we meet.

—from the book The Joy of Advent: Daily Reflections from Pope Francis
by Diane M. Houdek

Thoughts on Thanksgiving

 

A Prayer of Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving focuses on God’s gifts. Our challenge is to take nothing for granted, but to appreciate every blessing. Thanksgiving is a way of life. Indeed, the prayer of thanksgiving characterizes a eucharistic people. Our gratitude centers on the greatest gift of all—Jesus. This gift, and all the other gifts through God’s providence, are expressions of God’s love. How fitting and just it is that we always and everywhere express our gratitude to the Lord.

— from the book Living Prayer: A Simple Guide to Everyday Enlightenment
by Robert F. Mourneau

Thoughts on eating

 

Sharing the Feast

Eating is not only an individual delight but also, and mainly, a communal experience. Family reunions mean sharing story after story around the table. The food served becomes the backdrop for a renewal of mutual concerns remembered and new events announced. Those of us who have to travel for business may need to eat alone, but may not relish doing so. Travelers often end up at a local hangout not only to order a beer but to find a bartender or other patrons to converse with. Breaking bread with a friend is why I baked that loaf in the first place. A dinner scheduled to last for perhaps two hours can put us in a zone of leisure that seems to go on without our knowing how so much time has passed.

—from the book Table of Plenty: Good Food for Body and Spirit 
by Susan Muto

Thoughts on time

 

Time Speeds by Us

Time speeds by, one event falling into another. I see this now. Was I in danger of reaching the end without stopping to see what was being given? I kept looking up and another year was gone. Another holiday. Another birthday. I was living in my mind. I wasn’t really here. Now a door swings open and life is looking back at me. The roses, the trees, the birds, the stars. Everything is watching. I ask myself, where have I been? While I was lost in lists of things to do and goals to realize, where was I?

—from the book Stars at Night: When Darkness Unfolds as Night

Thoughts on fear

 

The Fellowship of the Weak

Fear, shame, and guilt often make us stay in our isolation and prevent us from realizing that our handicap, whatever it is, can always become the way to an intimate and healing fellowship in which we come to know one another as humans. After all, everyone shares the handicap of mortality. Our individual, physical, emotional, and spiritual failures are but symptoms of this disease. Only when we use these symptoms of mortality to form a fellowship of the weak can hope emerge. It is in the confession of our brokenness that the real strength of new and everlasting life can be affirmed and made visible. Henri Nouwen

Thoughts on changes

 Almost 60 years ago singer/songwriter (poet?) Bob Dylan scribbled the verses to his “The times they are a-changin” on a battered sheet of binder paper which recently sold for over $400,000. The song was written in a specific context, but it has become a kind of anthem not only for frustrated youth and civil rights, as it probably was back then, but a call to action for all kinds of people and movements seeking change for the better, or as our advent faith calls it “metanoia.”

This season in the secular calendar, as well as in the church year, is all about changing times and our own calls to action today. The secular calendar as well as the changing colors, light, colors, temperature and autumn leaves all around us point us to changing times as we get out the cameras, the rakes and the leaf blowers to welcome in another season.

In these days of the church’s year of grace, we begin a new Advent calendar celebrating the communion of saints who have gone before us, both those officially canonized and those not (yet) officially recognized. We celebrate in anticipation of Christmas, but also in expectation and hope that we too will someday join that great cloud of witnesses when the saints go marchin’ in.

As Dylan’s song did, this calls us to action, our own ongoing “seasoning” through our own “metanoia,” a transformative change of heart that is at the root of Jesus’ mission.

This suggests some questions for our reflection about our own personal and communal seasoning in this first week of Advent:

What we want to leave behind?

What new growth do we want to cultivate?

What new hopes of transformation is God calling us to?

The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius we offer you through White House’s ministry provide a helpful time and place for all of us to continue singing “The Times They are a Changin” and acting for metanoia.

-Fr. Ted Arroyo, SJ

Thoughts on suffering

 

The Awful Grace of God

The suffering creatures of this world have a divine Being who does not judge or condemn them, or in any way stand aloof from their plight, but instead, a Being who hangs with them and flows through them, and even toward them, in their despair. How utterly different this is from all the greedy and bloodthirsty gods of most of world history! What else could save the world? What else would the human heart love and desire? Further, this God wants to love and be loved rather than be served (John 15:15). How wonderful is that?! It turns the history of religion on its head. Jesus said it of himself: “When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself” (John 12:32) and “from my breast will flow fountains of living water” (7:38). It is only the “harsh and dreadful” commingling of both divine love and human tears which opens the deepest floodgates of both God and the soul. Eventually, I must believe, it will open history itself. I will sink my anchor here. To mourn for one is to mourn for all. To mourn with all is to fully participate at the very foundation of Being Itself. For some reason, which I have yet to understand, beauty hurts. Suffering opens the channel through which all of Life flows and by which all creation breathes, and I still do not know why. Yet it is somehow beautiful, even if it is a sad and tragic beauty.

—from the book Breathing Under Water: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps by Richard Rohr