Sunday, December 24th (4th Sunday of Advent):
Today we light the candle of love, to shine alongside the candles of hope, peace and joy! For God so “LOVED” the world… that He gave his only begotten Son… (john 3:16). God is still trying to love us and to love through us. To be a contemplative is to meditate on that love that is always being offered to us in every ordinary experience of every and each day. Our job, like Mary’s, is to be open to receive the love of God and then to give birth to it so that it can be shared with the world around us…
In Mary we see all the beauty of Advent concentrated. She is the one in whom the waiting of Israel is most fully and most purely manifested; she is the last of the remnant of Israel for whom God shows his mercy and fulfills his promises; she is the faithful one who believed that the promise made to her by the Lord would be fulfilled; she is the lowly handmaid, the obedient servant, the quiet contemplative. She indeed is the most prepared to receive the Lord…
The Abbot of Genesee monastery said that we should desire not only the first coming of Christ in his lowly gentleness but also his second coming as the judge of our lives. I sensed that the desire for Christ’s judgment is a real aspect of holiness and realized how little that desire was mine…
Now I see better how part of Christian maturation is the slow but persistent deepening of fear to the point where it becomes desire. The fear of God is not in contrast with his mercy. Therefore, words such as fear and desire, justice and mercy have to be relearned and reunderstood when we use them in our intimate relationship with the Lord.