Reflection
Our lives are a constant Advent season: we are continually waiting. We want to become, to discover, to be complete, to be fulfilled. We see this in the distance as something coming. We look to the birth of Jesus as God coming among us, yet the truth is that God is already here. God is the Source of All being present now. God’s presence shouts to us from all creation, from within those we love, from all we sense within ourselves. It is not God who must come but we who must return. Advent is about awareness. Advent is about rediscovery and remembering that “God is love and those who abide in love abide in God and God in them.”
Prayer
May this season be a time of transformation and fulfillment in the Advent of our lives.
Action
Be still and know that God is here.
Suggested Readings
I, the Creator, gave my people life. Peace, peace to the far and the near,
says the Lord; and I will heal them.
Isaiah 57:19
Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, heartfelt compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience bearing with one another and forgiving one another. . .as the Lord has forgiven you, so you must do. And over all of these put on love, that is the bond of perfection. And let the peace of Christ control your hearts the peace into which you were also called in one body.
Colossians 3: 12-15
let us not let this Advent go by like days on the calendar, because this is a moment of grace, a grace for us too, here and now.
Pope Francis
When we maintain ourselves as a system committed to love, we create a morphogenic field of peace, one in which gentleness and patience flow out of humble recognition of our connectedness to all. The keeping of the memory and mission of Jesus is not about making him the object of our worship but about making ourselves the locus of the reign of God.
Radical Amazement
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That deep emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.
Albert Einstein
Sometimes I just sit still and enjoy God’s presence.
Joyce Meyer
Creation is thus God’s presence in creatures. The Greek Orthodox theologian Philip Sherrard has written that “Creation is nothing less than the manifestation of God’s hidden Being.” This means that we and all other creatures live by a sanctity that is inexpressibly intimate, for to every creature, the gift of life is a portion of the breath and spirit of God.
Wendell Berry