The seconds and minutes and hours and days and weeks and months of another liturgical year have passed. Where did that time go? Today we begin a new liturgical year, Year A, and a new liturgical season, the four weeks of Advent. Time plays a role in our readings today and actually in all of Advent. “You do not know on which day your Lord will come,” for it may be “at an hour you do not expect,” our Gospel tells us.
“You know the time; it is the hour now for you to awake from sleep … the night is advanced, the day is at hand…” St. Paul tells us in our second reading (Romans 13:11-14). The spiritual call of Advent is to stop, look and listen so that we are ready to open the doors of our hearts more fully to the Lord. Advent is all about time, that mysterious entity that slips away from us as though stolen by that thief the Gospel talks about. Time is limited and irreplaceable, so we try to protect it from being taken away from us. But actually, or spiritually, time is meant to be spent — spent in listening, spent letting ourselves be interrupted to serve, spent nourishing our souls which we so often put off doing. But how can we do that when we are not even recovered from Thanksgiving and already madly planning for Christmas! I remember as a kid how we also got frantic as Christmas approached. To keep us focused on the reason for the season, our parents put an empty manger on a table. My brothers and I had to fill it by Christmas Eve, by placing one piece of straw in it for each time we did something to help another person. Maybe we grown-ups need to find our own mangers to fill to help us spend our Advent time well!
— Blog entry by Sister Mary Garascia
The post November 30, First Sunday of Advent: TIME, a Sunday Scriptures blog first appeared on Sisters of the Precious Blood.