The theme of Advent for this first week is “watching and waiting”. It is an invitation to our souls to enter into the peace of the Lord where our daily anxieties, worries, and even suffering experience God’s ever-merciful grace and peace.
Why is peace so hard to attain? I believe it is because we miss the eternal
sources of peace God has revealed to us, and thus try to attain peace in the
energies of our own flesh.
Jesus once when asked by disciples what the signs of his
(second) coming would look like, said:
Luke 21:33-36
"Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will by no
means pass away.
But take heed to yourselves, lest your hearts be weighed down with carousing,
drunkenness, and cares of this life, and that Day come on you unexpectedly.
For it will come as a snare on all those who dwell on the face of the
whole earth.
Watch therefore, and pray always that you may be counted worthy to escape
all these things that will come to pass, and to stand before the Son of
Man."
In this we begin to see the means of peace in a troubled
world. “My words”, remind us that it is
in Jesus that we discover God’s peace. When
Jesus met with his disciples on the last night before his arrest said these
words:
John 14:23-27
Jesus answered him, “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father
will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.
Whoever does not love me does not keep my words. And the word that you
hear is not mine but the Father’s who sent me. “These things I have
spoken to you while I am still with you. But the Helper, the Holy Spirit,
whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to
your remembrance all that I have said to you. Peace I leave with you; my
peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your
hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid”.
Among other things, we begin to see that to “watch and wait”
means we are in Jesus’ words, in Jesus’ prayer,
and in Jesus’ grace – through the Spirit of God.
Father Jean-Pierre De Caussade wrote a wonderful book entitled
“Abandonment to Divine Providence”.
He reminds us that watching and waiting in a proper way will always lead
us to Christ’s peace. “The Holy
Scriptures frequently recommend us to ‘wait on the Lord’ and there is hardly
any means better calculated to make us holy. There is nothing to which souls
already sufficiently exercised in the active life and the fulfillment of the
precepts should more earnestly apply themselves, than to these peaceful waitings
of Jesus’ words.
On this second day in Advent, we wait, we watch, we live in
the expectancy of Christ’s second Advent, even as we look forward – in these days
to follow - to celebrating his first Advent.
The world will not change, but we can change our world.
John 16:33
“These things I have spoken to you, that in Me you may have peace. In the
world you will have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the
world."
May His Peace rest upon you.
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