pray

Walking with Jesus will help us to experience the joy of the Father and the Holy Spirit.

“All things have been handed over to me by my Father. No one knows who the Son is except the Father, and who the Father is except the Son and anyone to whom the Son wishes to reveal him” (Lk 10:22).

God the Father knows God the Son and God the Son knows God the Father. They do not just know about each other, they know each other with a deep intimacy that is far beyond our human comprehension. Contemplating this reality can fill us with hope especially when we come to realize that Jesus is the Son of God who has come into our lives so that we can participate in the trinitarian communion of the Father and the Son and the love shared between them, who Jesus “rejoiced in” (Lk 10:21), the Holy Spirit!

Jesus has come as an agent of reconciliation, to restore our relationship with God, to undo the effects of the sin of separation that has so ruptured and wounded our relationship with him, each other, and his creation. Our hope this Advent is that we can come not just to a better understanding of God, but to restore our relationship with God and grow in intimacy with him through our participation in the life of his Son. Doing so, will also help us to do the same in our present relationships. Healing can happen when each of us are open to the Holy Spirit.

May the Advent season not get away from us before it even starts because of the external distractions from the material, commercial, and everyday busyness, nor from the everyday internal mental and psychological challenges that threaten. Choosing to be still, to breathe deep, and spend some time in God’s gift of creation, to enter into his natural rhythm, and bask in the wonder and vast expanse of it all can help us to step away from the distractions for even a little bit. In those moments we can find rest, reset, and react less. Reacting less helps relationships to heal.

I have done a lot of traveling in my life, but wherever I have gone, spending a year in the Bronx, six months in Los Angeles, a summer on the Pine Ridge and Rosebud Reservations, growing up and living in Connecticut for my first thirty years, or the last thirty years here in Florida, I have sought to spend time looking up at the sky. When I allow days to pass and I do not do so, I feel different and not for the better.

All of creation echoes the wonder and adoration of the gift that the season of Advent offers: Jesus, who became one with us in our humanity so we can become one with him in his divinity, invites us to participate in a deeper walk with his Father, the creator of heaven and earth, the one who knit us together in our mother’s womb, and who knows us better than we know ourselves! Please spend some time with God today in quiet reflection and allow him to love you where you are and as you are and rejoice in the Holy Spirit! Then share that joy with those in your lives.

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Photo: Walking on the way to our church hall for a meeting, turned back, and looked up. Wow. God is so good!

Link for the Mass readings for Tuesday, December 2, 2025

We begin another Advent to watch and pray for Jesus’ coming.

As the earth turned again one more time on its axis last night, and the shadows began to fall, night slowly crept over each part of our planet. Our sacred text, our sacred word, is not only written in the Bible, but the finger of God has traced his word across all of the earth, the galaxy, the universe, the whole of the created order. God continues to write and sing us his love song. The ground, foundation, and source of creation and our very being is the outpouring of the Trinitarian Love expressed between God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.

As the sun appeared to us to set, and night gently made its way across our minuscule earth in this part of the Milky Way last night, the vigil began and so also began the new liturgical year and we now find ourselves in the season of Advent. We heard or will hear again today the words of Jesus urging us to: “Stay awake” (Mt 24:42).

Paul in the second reading also sounds the alarm, for, “it is the hour now for you to awake from sleep” (Romans 13:11). Traditionally, the readings of the first two weeks of Advent focus on our watching for the second coming of Jesus. We are to watch and pray, to step away from the triggers of reacting. This Advent we are invited to slow down, observe how the daily cycle of day to night and night to day repeats itself. In doing so, we can enter into that daily rhythm of breathing, watching, and praying so that we can be more aware and more alert for the signs of his coming, like a watchman standing guard over the city. Then instead of reacting, we can choose to act according to God’s will.

During Advent, we also prepare in the final two weeks to remember again the first humble coming of Jesus, the Incarnation, in which the infinite Son of God took on flesh at his miraculous conception in the womb of Mary and became man. Fully God and fully man, Jesus experienced our human condition in the most vulnerable of settings. We are a people of memory, though we often forget, that is why we hear the story again of the simple birth of our savior, who many rejected even then, saying there was no room for him in the inn. Do we make room for Jesus to come to be present in our daily lives?

The third way we prepare for the coming of Jesus during Advent, is in our everyday experiences. We who have much in the way of material comfort need to remember, how God heard the cry of the poor and saved his people by sending Moses to free them from their bondage in Egypt. He sent judges and prophets to guide his people, and he sent his Son to be born in poverty, to free us from our bondage to anyone and anything that is not from him, anything that will lead us astray.

“God, in Christ, has come to set right a world gone wrong” (Grunow, 174). We have been made for God and nothing with fill our deepest desire to be in relationship with him. There is so much that attempts to lead us away from God. We can and do try to fill our deepest longings by grasping for anything but God and find ourselves dissatisfied time and again. We can’t save ourselves. The greatest willpower, discipline, and persistence is not enough. We need God, we need a savior. Let us remember this Advent who we are, whose we are, and who we are called to be. As we prepare for Jesus’ second coming and prepare to remember and celebrate his birth, may we also remember to set aside some time to enter into the rhythm of creation, to allow our hearts to beat in time with Jesus’ Sacred Heart.

We have been created by Love to love. As gently as the night gave way to the morning rays of the sun this morning, may we live and move more gently upon this earth. May our thoughts, words, and actions be filtered through the holy hepa filter of the Holy Spirit. So that we filter out that which is not, and accept that which is, of God. As we prepare well, we will not need to know the time or the hour, because we will know our Savior and so will be ready. Let us then awake, watch, and pray.

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Photo: Ready or not, Sunday Vigil here at Holy Cross, Advent has begun!

The Word on Fire Bible: The Gospels. Park Ridge, Illinois: Word on Fire, 2020.

Link for the Mass readings for Sunday, November 30, 2025