WE ENTER through the Gateway of Advent towards the mystery of another year. We are made sad by dark reminders from within of promises not kept, tasks unfinished, books unread, letters unwritten, talents unused, prayers unsaid, and, alas, reconciliation still not sought.
The Sacred Season is alive with hope filled challenge. "Awaken! Rise! Listen! Cast off!" To God we cry: Stir up your Power O Lord and come!" Amid the desolate waste and wilderness of our broken lives, a saving voice is heard. Many crooked paths will now be made straight and the many rough places plain. In the desert of our days, a Voice is calling. The December air is vibrant with hope made new.
A dominant word is NOW If today we hear His Voice, let us not harden our hearts. Fresh light, amid the winter darkness, shines on once familiar prayer, on the life giving Word of Scripture, and on the healing energy of Sacraments that point out to us beauty, goodness and grace, and impart to us the longed for power to reshape our fragile lives.
Scripture and Prayer link this cleansing season with Apocalypse and Judgement and our final hour. With Dietrich Bonhoeffer, we all can say: In my end is my beginning . . . The ending of a year, as of each passing day, can well be for us a new beginning. At year's end, as at day's end, we cry: "Lighten our darkness, O Lord!" We advance day by day with St Luke as guide. We listen in stillness with Mary, the Mother of our Redeemer. In spite of our pettiness and our selfishness and our sin, we too can utter, full of trust, our lesser Fiat. My life is in your hands, O Lord.
Soon the Christmas bells will ring. We pray for ears to hear, and for a heart made clean that we will know the healing and the joy of the Mystery at the heart of Christmas. Life has taught us that real happiness and lasting peace are not cheaply laid on bargain counters of our pilgrim life. The precious reality for which the heart cries out will now, as always, cost not less than everything.
And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year: "`Give me a light that I may tread safely in to the unknown!' . . . And he replied: ". . . go out into the darkness and put your hand in to the hand of God. That shall be to you better than light, and safrr than a known way'. . . (M. Louise Haskins). In silence and in peace our hope shall be".
Come . . . let us go up to the Mountain of the Lord, to the House of the God of Jacob; that He may teach us His ways and that we may walk in His paths . . ."