Let us prepare ourselves for the Season of Advent

While this issue of our diocesan newspaper may reach you before or just as we begin a new Church year of grace and favor from the Lord on the first Sunday of Advent, there is no better way to prepare ourselves to celebrate Our Lord’s birth than by observing Advent as it is intended to be kept.
 
While the Church considers the Advent Season one of its two penitential times in its year, the intent of this season is summed up in the Gospel accounts of St. John the Baptist’s cry to make straight the way of the Lord for He is near. It is certainly a time of self-denial both physical and spiritual, but it is meant to ready us not only to meet and recognize Jesus but to follow Him in our daily lives. Just as John the Baptist called for a conversion of heart by the baptism of repentance, so should we all do what we can to make ourselves spiritually and physically ready for Christ.
 
From our experience, we know that this can be very difficult given how secularized and commercialized our culture has made Christmas, even to the point of refusing to call this time Christmas but using the innocuous term “holiday time.” If we commit ourselves as Catholics to celebrating Advent as it ought to be celebrated–going to Mass more frequently and even daily and going to confession; making a daily commitment to one Corporal and one Spiritual Work of Mercy; and practicing one penance for the season–Christmas will definitely be a celebration of great joy for us.
 
To celebrate Advent as we ought will put in perspective our own earthly lives, all we have, whom we love, what we do and do not do, because we will see our lives much more from God’s view of each of us than from the world’s view of us. God Our Father looks on each of us with a loving mercy and generosity only He can give. In spite of all of our sins and infidelities, He still loves us and never abandons us. Do we really appreciate this?
 
In the Season of Advent, if we sincerely celebrate it as Catholics, shows us just how much Our Father loves us. We see and touch His love in the infant Jesus lying in that manger. The lowly manger in which He was placed already points us to the Cross on which He died for us. That is how much God loves us! 
 
May all of us praise and thank God this Advent and Christmas for His love of us which we do not deserve. Jesus is the living face of God, Who has come to us as a poor little baby to prove that sin and death are not God’s plan for us. Life fully with Him in heaven is the message of Advent. Let us prepare ourselves well.
 
A most blessed and Merry Christmas to all of you and yours! I shall remember you at the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass throughout Advent and Christmas.