Monday of the Second Week of Advent
The prophet Isaiah shines during Advent. “Isaiah twas foretold it…” as we sing in the beautiful carol Lo How a Rose. In fact, unique to the first two weeks of Advent, unlike the rest of the liturgical year, is priority for the first reading, more often than not from Isaiah of Jerusalem. The chosen Gospel of the day is supportive of that reading, rather than the other way around.
Advent, kept well as our culture enters the high stress time of year, can keep us focused and sane while offering challenging questions that get to the heart of it all.
How do we know that we are keeping a good Advent? English Benedictine Abbess Maria Boulding, OSB offers the following honest and very grounded inspiration:
“If you want God, and long for union with God, yet sometimes wonder what that means or whether it can mean anything at all, you are already walking with the God who comes.
If you are sometimes so weary and involved with the struggle of living that you have no strength even to want God, yet are still dissatisfied that you don’t, you are already keeping Advent in your life.
If you have ever had an obscure intuition that the truth of things is somehow better, greater, more wonderful than you deserve or desire, that the touch of God in your life stills you by its gentleness, that there is a mercy beyond anything you could ever suspect, you are already drawn into the central mystery of salvation.”
This is especially true when we struggle with faith or even wonder if the God we long for is really there. Isaiah offered oracles to anxious people with enemies and political intrigue amassing at the gates. They had to wonder where God was or maybe even if God was!
Just like us.
Isaiah of Jerusalem, the greatest of the writing prophets, assures: "Be strong, fear not! Here is your God, who comes with vindication; with divine recompense God comes." When our lives are beleaguered, that's all the more reason God insists, with the vehemence of a lover, to get right into the trenches with us.
What are our own grounded and honest questions as we begin Advent’s second week?
-Timothy J. Cronin