Join us in making the last 9 days of Advent extra-special by praying the O Antiphons with us, starting tomorrow. Here is a beautiful introduction:
The O Antiphons are Magnificat antiphons used at Vespers of the last seven days of Advent. We hear them also in the Alleluia verses of the Masses in the final days of the Advent season. Join us in this ancient way of intensifying our preparation for Christmas at: visit.pauline.org/ifollowlight.
(You can also subscribe and receive an email each day linking to the newest O Antiphon.)
As Advent begins, I just wanted to highlight a couple of more Advent resources that I think could help us live this beautiful season with more light:
1) If you are discerning your vocation, then this Advent is extra special for you! Make a Discernment Novena with a wonderful new app that our sisters have just released:
Deepen your vocational discernment with Discern It!, a new, free app from the Daughters of Saint Paul to help those discerning their vocations.
This wonderful little app is a novena that provides the perfect atmosphere for deepening your vocational discernment, to understand how God is calling you to love. With Discern It! you will have the opportunity to:
◊ Do something daily to help you discover God’s plan for your life.
◊ Learn how to be more open to the gifts God wants to give you.
◊ Find out ways to move past the hurdles in discernment.
7. For movie loves and Tolkien fans, The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies, releasing December 17th, could offer some insight on our Advent journey. The book has my favorite Humble Hobbit Moment–and I’m betting the movie will do a great job with it.
The prophet Isaiah and the prologue of the Gospel of John make it very clear that God doesn’t stop creating. God is always giving us new life: The Father continually re-creates us in His love, sustaining our existence; the Son continually saves and heals us–no matter how much we struggle or fall into sin, we can always go to Him for forgiveness, strength, and healing; the Spirit continually guides and inspires us–He is the Fulfillment of Jesus’ promise to “be with us always.”
Christmas is a celebration of the new life of a Baby–both the most human of events and the most divine. The Infant Christ who takes His first breath in a musty stable also wants to come into the imperfect, stained stable of our hearts, so that He can bring us life. While we want to prepare our hearts to receive Him–that’s why we strive to live awake, aware, and alert!–the most important thing is that we open our hearts to Him, no matter what state they are in.
We are imperfect beings, and yet, God loves us in our imperfection. There is a solidity about the physical imperfection of our world, and a “realness” about our human imperfection. This “realness” is where God wants to enter in. Otherwise, the Lord would not have chosen to be born in a stable, but perhaps in a palace.
As writers, we also want to open our hearts to how the Lord can work through the imperfection of our writing. Writers who are like me are never satisfied with their work. Even after it is posted or published, we wish we could go back and tweak it, or in some cases, completely delete it.
If I wait to feel that any of the pieces that I write are “ready,” I would never publish anything. No one would ever see what I’ve written.
Yet, some of the pieces that I feel most vulnerable about are the ones that readers tell me moved them deeply. As a writer and communicator for the Christ Child born in a stable, I need to accept the imperfections of my work, knowing that those “faults” or “cracks” in my writing that I simply cannot fix may be just what is needed for someone else to deeply connect with what I’m trying to say.
As Catholics and as writers, we are called to live in newness of life this Christmas, and to share that abundance of life with others, notwithstanding our imperfections.
I can’t believe we’re already halfway through the third week of Advent (and less than a week away from Christmas)! My third “A” for Advent (thanks to Preparing for Christmas with Richard Rohr–Daily Meditations for Adventby Father Richard Rohr) is Alert. I’m not speaking of a physical alertness. Instead, I think that Advent highlights the quality of spiritual “alertness” in our waiting. “I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I hope; my soul waits for the Lord more than those who watch for the morning, more than those who watch for the morning” (Psalm 130:6).
Spiritual alertness springs from awareness in the present moment (see last week’s post), but focuses more on what is to come. What future does God have in store for us? Our future is twofold: the immediate future and the eternal “future” that we will enter at the end of our lives. According to the Advent readings, especially from the prophet Isaiah, God wants to give us a future of joy, peace, abundance, and, above all, fullness of life! But to receive these graces, we need to prepare to receive them. This is where spiritual alertness is helpful.
Sunrise from my bedroom window during retreat
While I was making my 30 Day Spiritual Exercises in October, I arose early every morning to pray in the chapel, then returned to my bedroom to “pray in” the dawn. Those early morning moments of quiet intimacy with the Lord are something that I will always treasure. In waiting for the rising of the sun, I was practicing daily a state of alertness. I wasn’t just waiting, I was “looking for” the coming of the Lord, and this alertness accompanied me throughout the entire day of prayer.
Sometimes, when the Lord seems distant and we grow tired of praying in the silence, we might try to remember that “waiting for the Lord” and a ready state of spiritual alertness, while uncomfortable, may be one of the prayers that help us to grow the most–in faith, in hope, and in love.
Alertness is also, of course, a wonderful state of preparedness for us as writers, helping us to be more receptive to inspiration and new ideas, to see connections, to follow where our writing leads (not always easy to do). Especially when I’ve been away from writing for a while, I find it difficult to slip back into an alert mindset. One way that I try to do this is to take time the day before I delve back into writing to make a list of all the writing projects that I am working on or want to be working on, and prioritizing them. This somehow prepares my mind to start working on a writing project; in a way, I’ve given my mind a goal to start playing with for my future writing session. Then, when I start writing the next day, my mind has already been preparing for one of the top projects on my list. (I can’t always predict which project I’ll pick up to help me get back into a writing mode…but as long as I’m back into writing, I can eventually switch into the project with the first deadline.) What are some ways that you, as a writer, “prepare to write”?
May these last days of Advent–the liturgical season where the Church goes on “high alert”–be a time of spiritual alertness for all of us, a time when we prepare our hearts to recognize and receive the joy and peace that the Lord wants to give us.
Continuing with our Advent journey as writers, I have borrowed the A-adjectives from Father Richard Rohr’s Preparing for Christmas with Richard Rohr–Daily Meditations for Advent, where he uses five adjectives to describe the attitude with which we want to approach Advent: awake, aware, alert, attentive, alive.
Aware: Scrabble™ or Words With Friends™ players will notice that there is only one letter difference between “awake” and “aware.” I believe that they are very related. While being awake has to do with discovering something new, e.g., “waking up to the truth,” awareness is a fruit of being awakened and, I believe, goes deeper.
Awareness is less about discovery and more about deepening, or listening in the moment. Awareness, mindfulness, being observant–these are important attitudes I want more of, both in my spiritual live and in my writing life. But I have a confession: I haven’t been doing this well for the past few months, because I’ve been living in hurry mode. I still have many commitments, but starting today I have the opportunity to manage stress and my deadlines a bit differently. These are some of the things I am starting today to live in greater awareness:
1) Take time to slow down as I begin to pray or write. Although as a sister I pray a couple hours a day, if I don’t deliberately slow down, my prayer “races” and I tend to do all the talking and no listening. When I go to pray in the middle of the day, I am going to take ten extra minutes beforehand to take a walk or just sit quietly to let my whole body relax.
The same is true for my writing time–see #3 below.
2) Keep the drama on the page. When I’m stressed, it’s easier to let minor annoyances grow into major disturbances. If I take twenty minutes to journal about what’s really bothering me, I can usually regain my perspective, decide what I need to do about it (if anything), and I’ve already loosened up my writing “muscles.”
3) Set aside time within my writing time for playfulness. Juggling five or ten deadlines which I am barely meeting is deadly for my creativity. I still get that chapter written, but it is wooden rather than full of life. But, if I take ten minutes to journal or to play around with new ideas, the pay-off in my writing quality is immediate. A side benefit? I’ve also given myself a little space to breathe, which keeps me calmer and improves my outlook throughout the day!
These may be unusual Advent practices, but they all have to do with listening better, which is what Advent awareness is all about. Listening is essential to awareness: whether I’m listening to my own body or my subconscious, the subtext in a conversation, or the Lord’s invitations.
Advent and Christmas tend to be busy times for all of us, which is why it becomes even more important to snatch just a few minutes of slowing down, so that we can improve our listening and awareness.
In St. Anthony Messenger’s Press booklet, Preparing for Christmas with Richard Rohr–Daily Meditations for Advent,Father Rohr uses five adjectives to describe the attitude with which we want to approach Advent: awake, aware, alert, attentive, alive. These adjectives fit very well into a writer’s approach to his or her writing as well. But my favorite adjective of the five is awake, because it encompasses the other four.
Awake: The advent of winter–for those of us in the northern hemisphere–is a powerful reminder of the changing seasons of our lives. Another year is passing! Of all the seasons in the northeast, winter is hardest to ignore. The cold invigorates. Stepping outdoors from the cozy warmth of our home immediately perks up our senses, no matter how much our shivers protest.
Advent is the Church’s invigorating call to awaken to the meaning of life, and to the invitation to eternal life with the Christ-who-comes. Every time we “wake up” to the reality of the shortness of our lives, we want to take advantage of the gift of each moment. When we reflect that Jesus is inviting us to share in the fullness of life with Him, our time here becomes not only precious, but hope-filled. We have an eternity of joy to look forward to, if we take the opportunity to get ready now.
Advent is meant to wake us up spiritually, to enliven our spiritual perception.
The awakened state of Advent helps me as a writer. Part of being a writer is striving to be always “more” awake, because sleepiness kills creativity. When I am looking for an idea, whether I’m writing an article or a chapter, what I’m really doing is hoping to be awakened. I’m looking to discover something new, to make new connections, to see a new insight. The more spiritually awake I am, the more likely I am to make a new connection or see something in a new way. Even if I am not writing specifically about faith and I’m not describing the Something More for Whom we all long, that longing for the Eternal and sense of the incompleteness of our lives is infused in my writing.
Advent reminds us that our lives here on earth are a gift for the moment and a preparation for eternal joy with God. This perspective of faith makes every moment, every detail of our lives, precious. As a writer, if I can cherish the luminosity behind the day-to-day of my life, my writing will inevitably help others to awaken to the radiance hidden in their everyday lives.
For those who wish to deepen their understanding of Pauline spirituality, Father Guido Gandolfo, SSP, offers his reflection on how Bl. James Alberione would invite us to live Advent: entering the school of Jesus Master. You can find that reflection here.
I want to apologize for the not correctly putting in the links to the articles on my last post. The links are fixed now, so hopefully you will be able to enjoy Sr. Kathryn’s reflection on silence during these last days of Advent!
In October, I posted about a new book by Christine Valters Paintner entitled, The Artist’s Rule: a Twelve-Week Journey: nurturing your creative soul with monastic wisdom. In the past few days I’ve browsed a few of the online articles that Christine has posted, and I was especially delighted with: “Responding to Beauty’s Call: The Shape of an Aesthetic Spirituality”, a wonderful summing up of beauty as the “heart” of an artistic vocation. She quotes many of my favorite artists/writers: Blessed John Paul, Thomas Merton, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Frederick Buechner. Her website is full of resources for Catholic artists; I encourage you to visit it. One of her latest posts offers Practices for the 12 Days of Christmas.
These days of Advent waiting just before Christmas, our days can fill with busyness, even “franticness.” (For some of us, Christmas becomes a deadline rather than a a sacred moment.) Without letting go of the lovely ways that you plan to celebrate Christmas, I encourage you to squeeze in five minutes here and there to take a break from the pressing concerns of the moment. It could be a quick walk, a quiet moment to pray the Angelus, or just a few minutes with a family member or friend–to savor God’s presence in your life right now. There are so many ways that God wants to “be” with us–but we don’t take the time to see or hear. Let us spend these last few days of Advent truly “awake” to prepare our hearts to savor more profoundly the love of Christ come in the guise of a little Child.
Waiting is a spiritual practice that is highlighted in Advent. Waiting can also be an important practice for artists. These days, I feel that I’m in a time of waiting for inspiration to strike. I’ve finished the first draft of the first two chapters of my newest book and on one level, I’m pleased that I’ve gotten something down that seems to flow and make sense. But on another, deeper level, I seem to be waiting to be shown the path.
It’s not a passive waiting in the sense that I’m doing nothing. I’m starting to outline the third chapter and pull my ideas together. But I’m not entirely sure that the direction I’ve chosen so far is how I’m going to continue. The topic and general direction is probably not going to change, but I suspect the specific path on which this book is leading me (and eventually the reader) needs to change.
This experience of waiting seems to have overflowed into my prayer. I’m waiting for a sense that God is with me, a sense that God wants to work through me, through this book. Somehow the “waiting” for inspiration for my book and the “waiting” for a sense of God’s presence have become linked. Fortunately, I have the spirit of Advent to assist me in waiting. One of my favorite Advent meditations (and icons of Advent) is Mary in those moments and days after the Annunciation. She has attentively, generously responded to the invitation of God in her life, and now she waits on God:
–for the Word of God to take on flesh in her
–for the acceptance and understanding of St. Joseph
–for the coming of her Son who is not just her Son, but the very Son of God
–for the God who cradles the world to become the Son she can cradle in her arms
We look back on Mary’s story and everything is clear to us, but I don’t think Mary knew what to expect, or how the messianic prophecies would be fulfilled. She couldn’t have foreseen the birth in a stable or the flight to Egypt, nor how Jesus would grow up and then leave home to begin his public ministry. She couldn’t have foreseen the terrible tragedy of the Crucifixion of her Son–nor that his death would change everything, just as she couldn’t have foreseen the fullness of joy the Resurrection would bring. I suspect that her visit to Elizabeth was not just to help Elizabeth but also to seek strength and comfort during this time of expectation.
Mary waited for the coming of her Son without knowing where he would lead her. There are many Advent figures (including this week’s featured John the Baptist), but Mary is the most silent, the most present, the most engaged in waiting. The prayer of the Angelus takes on special meaning for me in this Advent season, and perhaps for the “season” of writing this book. Mary responds to God’s invitation by saying she is his handmaid–a servant or handmaid is one who “waits” on the master or mistress, just as we “wait” on God’s action in our lives.
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When Blessed James Alberione was just beginning the Pauline Family (including the Daughters of St. Paul), he described his experience as “waiting on God.” Here is one way he describes how God acts:
Providence worked in accordance with God’s ordinary method…to prepare the ways and bring them together according to His purpose, to provide the light and help needed, to make one wait in peace until His time comes, to begin always from the bare necessities, to act in such a natural way as to be unable to easily distinguish grace from nature, but, certainly, [employing] both.
Conversely, it is not the case to force God’s hand. It suffices to be on the alert, to let oneself be guided, and to strive in one’s various duties to employ mind, will, heart and physical strength…
The actions of a human being are so imperfect, unsound, inadequate and dubious that one is dutybound to put everything back into the hands of God’s Mercy and to allow oneself to be guided. He never forced the hand of Providence but always awaited God’s sign. (from Abundantes Divitiae Gratiae Suae by James Alberione, #s 43-45).
So, waiting is not just an Advent practice, it’s also a creative practice, and an important practice in the Pauline spirituality and mission. As I pray the Angelus, I will ask Mary for the grace to wait with more receptivity, more openness to guidance, more vigilance, and more peace. For a visual, musical “Angelus” moment, click play below:
Continuing with our Advent journey as writers, I have borrowed the A-adjectives from Father Richard Rohr’s 
Windows to the Soul Blog 