For Christ is Near

The Springtime of Advent

Gaudete!

(To our e-mail subscribers: this post features a video, which can be viewed by going to the blog itself)



Painting: Benozzo Gozzoli, Os Anjos em Adoração, detail

Expectation

Making Ourselves Ready

Mark the Season

That We May Prepare His Ways

Painting: Andrea Mantegna

Your Real Longing

Veni, Veni, Emmanuel

Come, My Light

'Come, my Light,
and illumine my darkness.
Come, my Life,
and revive me from death.
Come, my Physician,
and heal my wounds.
Come, Flame of Divine Love,
and burn up the thorns of my sins,
kindling my heart with the flame of Your love.'

St. Dimitrii










Painting: 'Young Boy Singing,' in US public domain due to age

Make Him Welcome in Your Heart

'Behold the most lovable Jesus, Who is about to be born in our commemoration of the 
forthcoming feast... 
caress Him, 
make Him welcome in your heart, 
adore Him frequently, 
imitate His humility, 
His poverty, 
His obedience 
and His gentleness.'

St. Francis de Sales




Painting: Décoration du sapin de Noël

In This Time of Preparation

'Silence is so lacking 
in this world 
which is often too noisy, 
which is not favorable 
to recollection and listening 
to the voice of God.  
In this time 
of preparation for Christmas, 
let us cultivate 
interior recollection, 
so as to receive and keep 
Jesus in our lives.'

Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI

    




Painting: Samuel Halpert, Through the Window

Advent's Intention

'Advent is concerned with 
that very connection 
between memory and hope 
which is so necessary to man. 
Advent's intention is to awaken 
the most profound and emotional 
memory within us; namely, 
the memory of the God Who became a child. 
This is a healing memory; 
it brings hope.... 
It is the beautiful task of Advent 
to awaken in all of us 
memories of goodness 
and thus to open doors of hope.'

Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI





Painting: Carl Ernst von Stetten

A Song of Gratitude

I have shared and 'featured' an older story in several places this Advent, but that's because I'm increasingly grateful to have lived it. My gratitude is actually beyond description as I think back on that one life-altering season.

I hope you will forgive yet another repetition.

I hope this story being shared, on two blogs, under two slightly different titles, is not TOO confusing!

I hope you will join in thanking God for His wondrous mercy to us all.

Click this line to reopen 'The Christmas Window'..... 








Painting at top: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, A Christmas Carol
Painting at bottom: Franz Skarbina Berliner Junge vom Weihnachtsmarkt, digitally lettered

Like a Secret Told by Angels

"Like a secret  
told by angels, 
getting known 
upon the earth,  
is the 
Mother's expectation
of Messiah's 
speedy birth." 

F. Faber








Painting: Antonello da Messina






 

If Christmas Finds You Hurting

It's a bad time of year to be hurting.  Not that there is a good time for pain, of course, but the weeks around Christmas and New Year's can be particularly poignant for some.

I know of what I speak.  While sparing you my life story (for now at least; consider such sparing a temporary gift), I will say that I've had a couple of Christmases in which I just wanted to hide away to wait out that year's crop of holly-jolly songs and plastic bows and ho-ho-hos. 

I suspect many of us have had such seasons.  Times when we can't be with loved ones, or a parent or sibling or close friend or spouse has died, or we've suffered a miscarriage, or we're sick, or we've lost our job, or there is illness in the family.  Even the time of year can make us feel blue.  Here in the northern hemisphere, night falls early in these months of bleak midwinter (I personally never adjust well to the long long long long dark).

I am thankful to be celebrating comfortably this year.  But for anyone reading this who is sad, in pain, or maybe just wishing the holidays would be over and gone - know that you're not alone.

In fact, you are so "not alone" that I'm going to ask a favor of everyone reading this.

Could we each take just a minute and offer a little prayer for anyone coming across these words who might be hurting?  If this gets to a number of people, that could amount to quite a few prayers.

May God lift burdens, heal pains, comfort loneliness, and soothe hearts.  In the Name of Jesus Christ, our Lord, I pray... 

'We beseech You, Lord and Master, be our help and succor, save those among us who are in tribulations, have mercy on the lowly, lift up the fallen, show Yourself to the needy, heal the ungodly; convert the wanderers of Your people, feed the hungry, release our prisoners, raise up the weak, comfort the fainthearted, let all nations know You are God.'  (St. Clement of Rome)

'Cast all your cares on Him, because He cares for You.' (1 Peter 5:7)

Painting:  Karl Ferdinand Sohn

This post is linked to Catholic Bloggers Monthly Linkup

Is There Room?

Sometimes, at this time of year, a question drifts into my mind.  It's always the same. 

"Is there room in Your heart for Me?" 

I immediately think of innkeepers.  I think of a house in Bethlehem where travelers once lodged, where no room was found when the time came for Jesus to be born.

Christ is in my heart; this I know.  But sometimes I wonder.  Am I providing a place of welcome and adoration?  Or could it be that I've allowed my heart to become cluttered with so many other things that I have little room in my life for Christ Himself.

The inn in Bethlehem was not filled with "bad" people on the night Mary and Joseph arrived seeking shelter.  It had no room for the holy family only because others had gotten there first.

Does Jesus find little space in some of my days simply because the hours fill up with everything else first?

Do I get up in the morning and put off prayer until I get one thing accomplished, and then one more thing - and do I ever find that the day has sped by without my spending any time at all in communication with God?  I am deeply ashamed to admit that more often than I care to mention, this has been the case.

My heart seems, today, like a manger filled with clutter.  Sometimes it's as if there's no room in it for the most important Person in the universe.   Just imagine the "logic" of that.  And so I come today to Jesus, asking HIM to clear out all the distractions.   I ask our Blessed Mother, who so tenderly prepared a place for Jesus, to help prepare my heart to be a fitting refuge for my Lord.  May she re-arrange my priorities as one might arrange pieces of straw in a manger.

As my Christmas gift this year, I ask that the same be done for you.  I ask that all our hearts be prepared as places of loving refuge for the King and Messiah Whose birth we are about to celebrate.

The world did not welcome Him when He came to earth as an infant; it does not welcome Him still.  You and I have the opportunity of welcoming Him in a world that does not do so.

May our hearts prepare Him room.

This post is a slightly edited version of one first published on The Cloistered Heart blog in December, 2011.

A Perfect Temple

'Blessed is He 
Who dwelt in the womb,
and wrought within it 
a perfect Temple
so that He might dwell in it,
a Throne 
so that He might be seated in it, 
a Garment 
so that He might be arrayed in it, 
and a Weapon 
so that He might conquer through it!'

St. Ephraem the Syrian









A hat tip to Melanie at the Association of Catholic Women Bloggers, where I found this painting.  Original source unknown.

Behold, He is Coming

Be

'Like a secret told by angels,

 getting known upon the earth,  

is the Mother's expectation

of Messiah's speedy birth.'

 

(F. Faber, "Our Lady's Expectations")  


Painting:  Arthur Joseph Gaskin, Annnciation

Interrupted By Glory

This time of year can bring both blessing and hassle.  Holy meditations, carols, the contagious wonder of wide-eyed children:  these unwrap great blessings and usually great fun. 

For some of us, however, the activities of Christmas can feel like an intrusion.  Day to day life is more or less put on hold by an urgent need to shop and wrap and bake and write and plan and decorate.  Chairs and tables are displaced by, of all things, a tree in the middle of our house.  There's no time to do ordinary things, as everyday life is seriously disrupted for weeks on end.  It can all seem like a major interruption.

Last December, the truth of it hit me.  This is what Christmas has been since the instant of the Incarnation:  an interruption.  Please stay with me here, because our first reaction to the word “interruption” could be negative.  But interruptions are often quite positive, and this Interruption was the most positive of them all.

Think of it.  Mary was living a quiet, hidden life.   She was betrothed.   Then one day an angel appeared to her, and with that Holy Interruption Mary’s life was changed forever.  As was Joseph’s, as was yours, as was mine. 

As we know, there was a Birth.  There were shepherds tending their flocks, and again an angel appeared.  A night of sheep-watching was interrupted.  

While most of the world went on unaware, a few men in the east noticed something out of the ordinary.  A sign in the sky.  Something signaling, to them, a wondrous Interruption – one so marvelous that they must drop any other plans they had and go in haste, and they must bring gifts.  These men were wise enough to know that somehow the world had changed, maybe even that the course of life on earth had been altered. 

The change was so shattering that mankind took notice.  Calendars would later mark the divide.  God Himself had split the heavens.  We now measure time by the before and after of that Grand Interruption, in effect saying that yes, we see.  We may not understand, really, but we recognize the wonder and the mystery of it.  God interrupted the cycle of sin and death by breaking into our world (John 3:16).  Jesus broke into the flesh of man, shattering hopelessness with His power and mercy. 

With Jesus' arrival in the flesh, God interrupted our misery.  He opened to us the path to salvation.  

When I feel stressed by Christmas interruptions, I try to remember what I'm celebrating.   Death was interrupted by Life.  Despair was interrupted by Hope.  With His glorious interruption, God tore through the fabric of time.      

This is a slightly edited re-post, originally appearing on my other blog last December.