Daily Reading for December 1

Advent offers all of us a chance to be born again. We might well ask with Nicodemus, “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” Jesus tells us that if we want to be part of the people of God we must be born “from above”: “No one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit” (John 3:4–7). In truth, all of life is an ongoing opportunity for us to find new life and to get in touch with God’s ongoing work of co-creating the world with us.

In the beginning God created everything. Created by God, we are called to be stewards of all that we have and receive from God. The mystery of the incarnation, Christmas, and Christ’s coming invites us to enter fully into God’s ongoing acts of creation and to participate joyfully in the reign of God.

Advent calls us to remember that God is our Creator. Remembering God’s acts of creation, as well as God’s acts of redemption, liberation, salvation, and grace, we grow in anticipation of the Child’s coming at Christmas and on the last day. The first step in Advent is to remember that we are created by God and loved by God.

From The Womb of Advent by Mark Bozutti-Jones. Copyright © 2007. Seabury Books, an imprint of Church Publishing. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Daily Reading for December 2 • The First Sunday of Advent

There is perhaps nothing we modern people need more than to be genuinely shaken up. Where life is firm we need to sense its firmness; and where it is unstable and uncertain and has no basis, no foundation, we need to know this too and endure it.

We may ask why God has sent us into this time, why he has sent this whirlwind over the earth, why he keeps us in this chaos where all appears hopeless and dark and why there seems to be no end to this in sight. The answer to this question is perhaps that we were living on earth in an utterly false and counterfeit security. And now God strikes the earth till it resounds, now he shakes and shatters; not to pound us with fear, but to teach us one thing—the spirit’s innermost moving and being moved.

Here is the message of Advent: faced with him who is the Last, the world will begin to shake. Only when we do not cling to false securities will our eyes be able to see this Last One and get to the bottom of things. Only then will we be able to guard our life from the frights and terrors into which God the Lord has let the world sink to teach us, so that we may awaken from sleep, as Paul says, and see that it is time to repent, time to change things. It is time to say, “All right, it was night; but let that be over now and let us be ready for the day.” We must do this with a decision that comes out of these very horrors we have experienced and all that is connected with them; and because of this our decision will be unshakable even in uncertainty.

Condemned as a traitor for his opposition to Hitler, Father Alfred Delp, a Jesuit priest, wrote this piece in a Nazi prison shortly before he was hanged in 1945. Quoted in Watch for the Light: Readings for Advent and Christmas (Plough Publishing House, 2001).

Daily Reading for December 4 • John of Damascus, Priest, c. 760

So then, after the assent of the Holy Virgin, the Holy Spirit descended on her . . . purifying her, and granting her power to receive the divinity of the Word, and likewise power to bring forth. And then was she overshadowed by enhypostatic Wisdom and the Power of the most high God, the Son of God Who is of like essence with the Father as of Divine seed, and from her holy and most pure blood He formed flesh animated with the spirit of reason and thought, the first-fruits of our compound nature; not by procreation but by creation through the Holy Spirit; not developing the fashion of the body by gradual additions but by perfecting it at once, He Himself, the very Word of God, standing to the flesh in the relation of subsistence. For the divine Word was not made one with flesh that had an independent preexistence, but taking up His abode in the womb of the holy Virgin. . . . So that He is at once flesh, and at the same time flesh of God and the Word, likewise flesh animated, possessing both reason and thought. Wherefore we speak not of man as having become God, but of God as having become man.

From Exposition of the Orthodox Faith by John of Damascus, quoted in Invitation to Christian Spirituality: An Ecumenical Anthology, edited by John R. Tyson (Oxford University Press, 1999).

Daily Reading for December 5 • Clement of Alexandria, Priest, c. 210

Bridle of colts untamed,
Over our will presiding;
Wing of unwandering birds,
Our flight securely guiding.

Rudder of youth unbending,
Firm against adverse shock;
Shepherd, with wisdom tending
Lambs of the royal flock;

Thy simple children bring
In one, that they may sing
In solemn lays
Their hymns of praise
With guileless lips to Christ the King.

King of saints, almighty Word
Of the Father’s highest Lord;
Wisdom’s head and chief;
Assuagement of all grief;
Lord of all time and space,
Jesus, Savior of our race;

Shepherd, who dost us keep;
Husbandman, who tillest,
Bit to restrain us, Rudder
To guide us as Thou willest;
Of the all-holy flock celestial wing;

Fisher of men, whom Thou to life dost bring;
From evil sea of sin,
And billowy strife,
Gathering pure fishes in,
Caught with sweet bait of life:

Lead us, Shepherd of the sheep,
Reason-gifted, holy One;
King of youths, whom Thou dost keep,
So that they pollution shun:

Steps of Christ, celestial Way;
Word eternal, Age unending;
Life that never can decay;
Fount of mercy, virtue-sending;
Life august of those who raise
Unto God their hymn of praise,
Jesus Christ!

Nourished by the milk of heaven,
To our tender palates given;
Milk of wisdom from the breast
Of that bride of grace expressed;
By a dewy spirit filled
From fair Reason’s breast distilled;
Let us sucklings join to raise
With pure lips our hymns of praise
As our grateful offering,
Clean and pure, to Christ our King.
Let us, with hearts undefiled,
Celebrate the mighty Child.

A hymn of Clement of Alexandria, quoted in Invitation to Christian Spirituality: An Ecumenical Anthology, edited by John R. Tyson (Oxford University Press, 1999).

Daily Reading for December 6 • Nicholas, Bishop of Myra, c. 342

We can choose the light. Choosing the good and the light is not always an easy process. Many give up on growth in the Christian life because they find it difficult to shake their destructive patterns of behavior. We have learned we should choose the good, but we do not always understand the role of desire. If we do not understand desire, we will never understand choice. Desire is what saves us in the Christian life.

Desire is an innate gift of the Holy Spirit that needs to be intentionally cultivated. Desiring to do good, even when we do not choose to, is a step in the right direction. Let us be patient with ourselves when we fail to pray, fail to be courageous, or fail to practice what we preach. Let us tap into our gift of desire and cultivate it though prayer.

Advent invites us to stand up as children of God. Being children, of course, requires having birth parents, and this is the rub. Some of us do not treasure the time spent with our parents or do not have parents at all. Because of this, we find it hard to understand what it means to have God as our parent and to be children of God. On the other hand, some of us have had wonderful relationships with our parents, and it is easy for us to understand God as loving parent. In Christian community, we can share our experiences of childhood and explore our understandings of God as parent. When was the last time we shared our experiences as parents and children in a faith setting? When was the last time we shared the joys and pains of our childhood in the context of a prayer gathering or Eucharist? Doing this could be a tremendous source of healing and life this Advent.

Being children of God requires that we act like children. Cry when you need milk. Act silly to make God laugh. Listen to what God says. Throw things off the table and experience God’s patience. Curl up in the arms of God. Ask God to read you a story. Allow God to throw you up in the air. Play hide and seek with God. Allow God to play hide and seek with you. Cry when God goes away. Squeal with delight when God comes back. Listen to God say how much you are loved. Tell God of your love. This, without a doubt, is what Advent is all about.

From The Womb of Advent by Mark Bozutti-Jones. Copyright © 2007. Seabury Books, an imprint of Church Publishing. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Daily Reading for December 7 • Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, c. 397

To Thee, O Fountain of mercy, my mother poured out still more frequent prayers and tears that thou wouldst hasten thy aid and enlighten my darkness, and she hurried all the more zealously to the church and hung upon the words of Ambrose [of Milan], praying for “the fountain of water that springs up into everlasting life” [Jn 4:14]. For she loved that man as an angel of God, since she knew that it was by him that I had been brought thus far to that wavering state of agitation I was now in, through which she was fully persuaded I should pass from sickness to health, even though it would be after a still sharper convulsion which physicians call “the crisis.”

Ambrose himself I esteemed a happy man, as the world counted happiness, because great personages held him in honor. Only his celibacy appeared to me a painful burden. But what hope he cherished, what struggles he had against the temptations that beset his high station, what solace in adversity, and what savory joys thy bread possessed for the hidden mouth of his heart when feeding on it, I could neither conjecture nor experience. I heard him, indeed, every Lord’s Day, “rightly dividing the word of truth” [2 Tim 2:15] among the people. And I became all the more convinced that all those knots of crafty calumnies which those deceivers of ours had knit together against the divine books could be unraveled.

From the Confessions of Augustine of Hippo, quoted in Invitation to Christian Spirituality: An Ecumenical Anthology, edited by John R. Tyson (Oxford University Press, 1999).

Daily Reading for December 8

When we call God ‘Father’, we are called to step out, as apprentice children, into a world of pain and darkness. We will find that darkness all around us; it will terrify us, precisely because it will remind us of the darkness inside our own selves. The temptation then is to switch off the news, to shut out the pain of the world, to create a painless world for ourselves. A good deal of our contemporary culture is designed to do exactly that. No wonder people find it hard to pray. But if, as the people of the living creator God, we respond to the call to be his sons and daughters; if we take the risk of calling him Father; then we are called to be the people through whom the pain of the world is held in the healing light of the love of God. And we then discover that we want to pray, and need to pray, this prayer. Father; Our Father in heaven; Our Father in heaven, may your name be honoured. That is, may you be worshipped by your whole creation; may the whole cosmos resound with your praise; may the whole world be freed from injustice, disfigurement, sin, and death, and may your name be hallowed. And as we stand in the presence of the living God, with the darkness and pain of the world on our hearts, praying that he will fulfill his ancient promises, and implement the victory of Calvary and Easter for the whole cosmos—then we may discover that our own pain, our own darkness, is somehow being dealt with as well.

This, then, I dare say, is the pattern of Christian spirituality. It is not the selfish pursuit of private spiritual advancement. It is not the flight of the alone to the alone. It is neither simply shouting into a void, nor simply getting in touch with our own deepest feelings, though sometimes it may feel like one or other of these. It is the rhythm of standing in the presence of the pain of the world, and kneeling in the presence of the creator of the world; of bringing those two things together in the name of Jesus and by the victory of the cross; of living in the tension of the double Advent, and of calling God ‘Father’.

From The Lord and His Prayer by N. T. Wright (Eerdmans, 1996).

Daily Reading for December 10

Do we feel seen, heard, remembered, and blessed by God? In our busy lives, we easily forget that we are precious in the sight of God. “If God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith?” (Matthew 6:30). Indeed, it is our faith in God that reminds us we are forever in the sight of God. Our search for meaning as Christians is to come to this realization of knowing that we are always in God’s view. To live in the sight of God calls us to trust the providence and the workings of God.

The more we attune our lives to this reality, the more we take on the eyes of God. Numerous times throughout the Scriptures we hear God described as seeing the suffering of individuals and entire peoples. God does see the suffering of our hearts, which we try so hard to conceal from one another. God sees the suffering of millions of poor and homeless people, whom our society tries to hide from our view. God sees us when we are Leah, needing to give birth. God sees us when we are Jacob, struggling to make sense of God’s promises. God sees us when we are Rachel, desperate to have things work out.

Advent is also a time to be heard by God. To approach Christmas without prayer is to go to the airport without a ticket. God wants to hear our prayers, our hopes, our conflict, our pain, and our joys. In an ever more talkative society, we have distanced ourselves from talking to our Creator. As Christmas approaches, we spend a lot of time talking to friends, but few of us spend sufficient time giving God a chance to hear us. God knows that we are happy, but God wants us to sing thanks. God knows that we hurt, but God wants us to proclaim a ballad. God knows that we can speak, but God wants to hear our voices. How often do we cry out to God? How often do we sing God’s praises? When was the last time we said “I love you” to God?

Do we remember that we are beginning again, starting over and growing? It is a joyful season and also a difficult one. By the end of the year, the last thing most of us want is to be asked to improve and to grow. The weather and the light contribute to a desire to give up, to lie down and not do much. For us as Christians the call goes out to wake up and be watchful. Pay attention, the Scriptures remind us over and over again. In the quiet and in the cold, we listen attentively to God, and we warm our hearts by drawing close to God. Who knows the birth places deep within us that God will open?

How do we grow in the areas where we feel forgotten by God? How do we grow when we feel barren like Leah and Rachel? How do we grow in the quiet and the dark? Spend some time today reflecting on your spiritual journey in the dark night of the soul. Let us be still, let us be contemplative in our actions, not for our own sake, but because God needs us to be light, even as the night approaches.

From The Womb of Advent by Mark Bozutti-Jones. Copyright © 2007. Seabury Books, an imprint of Church Publishing. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Daily Reading for December 11

Every year we celebrate the holy season of Advent, O God. Every year we pray those beautiful prayers of longing and waiting, and sing those lovely songs of hope and promise. Every year we roll up all our needs and yearnings and faithful expectation into one word: “Come!”

And yet, what a strange prayer this is! After all, you have already come and pitched your tent among us. You have already shared our life with its little joys, its long days of tedious routine, its bitter end. Could we invite you to anything more than this with our “Come”? Could you approach any nearer to us than you did when you became the “Son of Man,” when you adopted our ordinary little ways so thoroughly that it’s almost hard for us to distinguish you from the rest of our fellow men?

In spite of all this we still pray: “Come.” Is it true, then, that we only “celebrate” this season, or is it still really Advent? Are you the eternal Advent? Are you he who is always still to come, but never arrives in such a way as to fulfill our expectations? Are you the infinitely distant One, who can never be reached?

You promised that you would come, and actually made good your promise. But how, O Lord, how did you come? You did it by taking a human life as your own. You became like us in everything: born of a woman, you suffered under Pontius Pilate, were crucified, died, and were buried. And thus you took up again the very thing we wanted to discard. You began what we thought would end with your coming: our poor human kind of life, which is sheer frailty, finiteness, and death.

From “The God Who Is to Come” by Karl Rahner, in Encounters with Silence, translated by James M. Demske (St. Augustine’s Press, 1999).

Daily Reading for December 12

Contrary to all our fond hopes, you seized upon precisely this kind of human life and made it your own. And you did this not in order to change or abolish it, not so that you could visibly and tangibly transform it, not to divinize it. You didn’t even fill it to overflowing with the kind of goods that men are able to wrest from the small, rocky acre of their temporal life, and which they laboriously store away as their meager provision for eternity.

No, you took upon yourself our kind of life, just as it is. You let it slip away from you, just as ours vanishes from us. You held on to it carefully, so that not a single drop of its torments would be spilled. You hoarded its every fleeting moment, so you could suffer through it all, right to the bitter end.

Is that your real coming? Is that what humanity has been waiting for? Is that why men have made the whole of human history a single great Advent-choir, in which even the blasphemers take part—a single chant crying out for you and your coming? Is your humble human existence from Bethlehem to Calvary really the coming that was to redeem wretched humanity from its misery?

It is said that you will come again, and this is true. But the word again is misleading. It won’t really be “another” coming, because you have never really gone away. In the human existence that you made your own for all eternity, you have never left us.

But still you will come again, because the fact that you have already come must continue to be revealed ever more clearly. It will become progressively more manifest to the world that the heart of all things is already transformed, because you have taken them all to your heart.

Behold, you come. And your coming is neither past nor future, but the present, which has only to reach its fulfillment. Now it is still the one single hour of your Advent, at the end of which we too shall have found out that you have really come.

O God who is to come, grant me the grace to live now, in the hour of your Advent, in such a way that I may merit to live in you forever, in the blissful hour of your eternity.

From “The God Who Is to Come” by Karl Rahner, in Encounters with Silence, translated by James M. Demske (St. Augustine’s Press, 1999).

Daily Reading for December 13

The feast of St. Lucy (304) occurs during the Geminid meteor showers, sometimes called “St. Lucy’s Lights.” The northern sky filled with shooting stars prompts us to put on the “armor of light” in anticipation of the day of the Lord. Before the Gregorian calendar reform in 1582, the feast of Santa Lucia fell on the shortest day of the year. Lucy (“light”) marked the close of the long, dark nights and heralded the new light to come. Thus her feast is identified with a wreath of candles to drive away the darkness and welcome the returning sunlight.

Born to nobility in Syracuse, Sicily, young Lucy accompanied her mother on a pilgrimage to the tomb of Agatha. Her mother was miraculously healed, convincing Lucy to serve God. She gave all her riches to the poor and lived a life of service. She was beheaded after surviving extreme torture during the Diocletian persecutions. Her relics remain in Venice, Italy, at Santa Lucia Church.

Tales of a miraculous appearance of Lucy to a desperately hungry Sweden, her head haloed with light and her arms filled with enough food for everyone, generate the traditional “Lucia bride.” In Swedish homes, at cockcrow, the eldest girl in the house dresses in a white gown sashed in red and crowns her head with an evergreen wreath of seven to nine candles to impersonate Lucy. The Lussibrud wakes all the sleepers with coffee, sweet drink, and cakes called “Lucy cats.” The cakes are circular swirls, like cinnamon buns, that represent the eternal Sun. All gather for breakfast and tales of Lucy, who announces that darkness is broken and the Son is coming.

To honor Lucy and the Advent of the Light of the world, choose a family member to rise early and awaken the household with beverage and donuts or round sweet rolls. Just before dawn, you may want to go outside and try to spot the Geminid lights.

From Teach Us to Number Our Days: A Liturgical Advent Calendar by Barbara Dee Baumgarten. Copyright © 1999. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Daily Reading for December 14

Advent. A time of waiting and watching and preparation. A time, if we are not careful, of rampant materialism and tension that looks forward only to a too-secularized and too-commercialized Christmas holiday. On the other hand, Advent can be a time like no other—a time in which we pause and ask Christ into our hearts, invite God into our world.

But who is this God who comes to us and enters into our life? How do we invite God into our lives? How do we know Christ Jesus? One way to discover Christ and to pray for God’s coming is to use the ancient prayers of the early church together with a present-day understanding of what Christ’s coming will mean for us.

The well-known carol, “O come, O come, Emmanuel,” provides just such a passageway linking the old and the new. The carol’s familiar names for Christ are based on the Advent Antiphons—the “Great O’s”—which date back possibly to the sixth century. These antiphons—short devotional texts chanted before and after a psalm or canticle—were sung before and after the Magnificat, the Song of Mary, at Vespers from December 16 through December 23. Each of the antiphons greets the Messiah and ends with a petition of hope. The simple refrain of the carol, “Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel!” sets the tone for this Advent time of waiting and expectation.

From Hasten the Kingdom: Praying the O Antiphons of Advent by Mary Winifred, C.A. (Liturgical Press, 1996).