Advent!

"This is eternal life, that they know thee, the one true God, and Jesus Christ whom He has sent." John 17:30 

Advent means 'to come to'. During Advent we prepare the way for Christ in three areas: His birth, the Sacraments, and the second coming. We must prepare our souls for ALL THREE! Yippee! In order to celebrate well, we should prepare well for the celebration. Just like Thanksgiving, when we only eat bits and pieces here and there in order to really appreciate and eat as much food as possible the main meal! First we fast, then we FEAST! All great feasts are preceded by fasting which makes the feast itself more joyful!

What to look for: symbols, of course! Since Advent is considered a mini-lent, we are going to see PURPLE! Churches will be adorned in purple, the Priests included, until week number three. Called Gaudete Sunday, the priests will wear pink (luckyyy, and we will talk more about this later). Lastly, we will omit the Gloria on Sundays during Advent (sad). 

The Church CELEBRATES all that is GOOD.

"We are an Easter people and halleluja is our song!" - JPII

We can better celebrate Christmas (ALL 12 DAYS OF IT) if we use Advent as a way of preparation. To prepare, to wait well, we must desire that he comes to us! 

Do we desire that Christ come into our lives? 

Has He come into your life? 

If He has come, we can use Advent as a time to prepare and wait for Him to enter into parts of our lives and our hearts that he has not come into yet. And how he longs to do so! 

It is in God's nature to desire, to love. HE IS LOVE. Because love demands a response, He is desperate for you. 

God, infinitely perfect and blessed in himself, in a plan of sheer goodness freely created man to make him share in his own blessed life. For this reason, at every time and in every place, God draws close to man. He calls man to seek him, to know him, to love him with all his strength. He calls together all men, scattered and divided by sin, into the unity of his family, the Church. To accomplish this, when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son as Redeemer and Savior. In his Son and through him, he invites men to become, in the Holy Spirit, his adopted children and thus heirs of his blessed life. - Paragraph 1 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

How does this truth change the way you wait? To believe that God is desperate for you!? 

We want to be saints! Do you aspire to love God as much as he can possibly be loved by you?? If I give him permission to do this, to give us new hearts, to give us HIS heart, we can love Him as much as He can be loved by us! 

When we're divided though, we are unable to celebrate. We get caught up in a life that we can't stop - work, school, relationships, errands, responsibilities, etc. If I'm unable to rejoice now, while i'm waiting, then life stops making sense. Gaudate Sunday is usually during finals. This, the third week in Advent, in the midst of ALL THE CRAZY THINGS, you have the bright (rose) pink reminder that you've made it over halfway, that you've almost made it to the feast! You don't have to be done to rejoice. It is a choice. You can actually make the decision to rejoice instead of dwell in the stress, the mundane, the numbness. It's not fake or made up, its a real decision that you have the power to make. Just as we choose to smile or not to smile as we walk on campus or in the grocery store to someone we make eye contact with. 

Fr. Mike Schmitz talks about this in his 'Waiting Well' series from Advent a couple years ago. He goes on to reference a study done at an English university. They studied the physiology of the effects of smiling. Not the kinesiology (the how), but the chemical reaction that happens in your brain when you smile (the what). They found that one smile produces the same endorphin reaction as eating 2,000 chocolate bars; the same endorphin reaction as someone who was just told they've won $25,000! THAT IS A LOT OF JOY. He says that "rejoicing is remembering all the reasons you have for joy, but forgetting one thing: yourself". We have to stop thinking so much about ourselves. 

He makes the analogy later, you can't enjoy dancing if you're thinking about yourself. SO TRUE. If i'm at a wedding, or a bar, or playing Just Dance in my living room, I would never think it was fun if I was thinking about how I looked or what I was doing. It's one of those recurring moments in life where you just get to escape to this far off (and mostly weird) place that you can let go of all social norms and do whatever you want (for the most part, and upholding yours and everyone else's dignity of course). 

When we think about ourselves less, we have freedom to rejoice because our focus shifts to God. WHO IS GOOD AND LOVE ITSELF. You can choose to smile, you can choose to dance, and choose to rejoice, even in the midst of pain and business. That is what it means to be waiting well. 

I'm praying for all of us to love God a little more come Christmas. That we be bold enough to ask for new hearts, even. Hearts that have infinite capacity to love and be loved. This world needs people with new hearts, hearts of flesh and not of stone, hearts of forgiveness and charity, hearts that are selfless and