The point, again, is that He held nothing back. We need to realize that Jesus continues to give us everything if we are willing to receive it. If you are finding that you need to know His love more deeply in your life this day, try spending time reflecting on the Scripture passage above.
Advent 2016 resources
Spend time reflecting upon that last self gift, the gift of that water and blood flowing from His wounded Heart. It is a sign of His infinite love for you. Reflect upon it being poured out especially for you. See it, be immersed in it, and be open to it.
Advent resources | The Catholic Sun
Let His love transform and fill you. Sacred Heart of Jesus, have mercy on us. I thank You, dear Lord, for giving all to me. You held nothing back from me and You continue to pour out Your life for my good and for the good of the whole world. May I receive all You give to me and hold nothing back from You. Jesus, I trust in You. It is to take the first step on the road to union with the God who makes up all our deficiencies. It is only repentance that opens us to the rest of the world. The truth is that the opposite of repentance is the asphyxiating arrogance that chokes off truth, that gags grace, that smothers the God in us so that we can make ourselves God: I know the gospel, but I have no intention of living it.
Vengeance is more important now. Getting ahead is more important now.
Being in power is more important now. Being right is more important now. It is only repentance that shatters the center of the self-centered soul. The great irony of the spiritual life is that it is only when we know that we have done wrong that we become capable of being right. Anything else leaves no room for the inpouring of God because it is far too full of itself.
The rabbis taught that sinners are actually closer to God than are the perfect.
We are all tied to God by a thread, they say. When we sin, the cord breaks. But when we repent, the angels tie a knot in the cord that brings us closer to the heart of God, closer to the source of grace, closer to Truth. The second week of Advent calls us to recognize our weakness and to know without doubt that God supplies for it.
He will take great delight in you, he will quiet you with his love, he will rejoice over you with singing. Scripture is very clear: God likes us, takes delight in us, in fact. God rejoices in our creation and wants us to be who we are, no more, no less. The problem may be that we have not yet learned to like ourselves.
Search form
It is the power of getting out of any situation all that there is in it. It is arduous and it is rare. The desire to do more than we can possibly do, to be more than we really are, to get more than we clearly need leaves us in terminal dissatisfaction. We are disappointed with life. And eventually, driven ourselves, we drive them, too. We want more than those who are the lifelines of our own existence, the love of our lives—our children, our families, our coworkers—can possibly give. The effect of that kind of discontent destroys relationships. It also takes the very joy out of living and being and growing.
When people ask John what they should do in life, his answer is disarmingly simple: Give every system what it deserves and not one thing more. Be soft-souled and openhearted. Be content with life yourself and be gentle with others. All of us need the gentling of the other. It is a long cry from a stable, a baby, a homeless mother, and a pleading father who come quietly, bearing a tender God to Earth.
The third week of Advent calls us to live life with heads up and arms open, content to be alive and pulsing with fullness of spirit whatever the circumstances of the day. In week four of Advent we come closer and closer to the heart of the Christmas message: God comes to us always in small things and asks us to believe in our own smallness, as well. The month of preparation that starts with hope, acknowledges failure, and counsels contentment now asks us to believe that God is at work being born in us, too, however little we think we can do, however faltering our efforts, however small and ineffective we claim we are, however simple our successes.
The God who does not expect perfection from us does expect commitment, wholehearted and untiring, faithful and trusting, full of life and full of spirit. We are not here for nothing.
- 23 Ways to Jump Start Your HR Career.
- Mémoire de Madame de Valmont (French Edition);
- Recent Posts.
In a society, wealthy as it is, where children go to bed hungry every night, in a country where violence is the drug of choice, in a world where people are used as pawns in the corporate power game, underpaid and undefended, we are not here for nothing. Advent requires that we prepare to do some birthing of the reign of God on our own. The temptation is to plead powerlessness, to argue for our distance from the issues, the information, the decisions. But it takes no power at all to ask teachers and store owners and company executives why children in the sweatshops are working for pennies 12 hours a day at the age of 7 to make our clothes.
It takes no power at all to serve at a soup kitchen.
Unwrap the gifts of Advent
It takes no power at all to write a letter to the editor pointing out the disparities of the local budget or the lack of day-care centers or the need for free clinics in the town and medical insurance for children in the country. The fact is that the stables of the world still house children whom the Christ child, whose birth we prepare to celebrate, came to raise to life. This time it is our door before whom they stand and beg for shelter while people beg for charities outside the stores where we buy our gifts. We are the people being asked to take them into our minds and hearts and souls.
Commitment is the willingness to do something in our own lives that makes life better for others, whatever our smallness, however remote we feel from the problem. Commitment has nothing to do with our power. It has to do with our willingness. God does not lay the burden of conversion simply on the mighty.
Because they are mighty? No, precisely because they are not. If God is with even us, if God can do great things through us, God can indeed do anything—and we can do anything, too. There is a certain amount of misunderstanding about Christmas. It is not the birth of Jesus. It only commemorates the birth of Jesus. Christmas is really meant to mark our own new beginning of spirit and life and understanding and commitment. It is our own rebirth that Christmas seeks to celebrate. Christmas is only the culmination of an Advent that sets us on a road to new life, new insight, new awareness, and new energy of heart.
This Advent invites us to move away from a neurotic and unattainable perfectionism that can only depress our spirits to the kind of sorrow of heart that leads us to begin over and over and over again to confront the effects of sin in the world with hearts high and souls ready. This Advent guides us to develop the internal contentment it takes to reshape a grasping and hectic world around us with quiet certitude rather than to accept it with unthinking or even sinful complacency. This Advent asks us to realize the power of smallness again.
It moves us to recommit ourselves to re-form our own minuscule worlds to take in Christ the child, Christ the outcast, Christ the refugee, Christ the other whose strangeness frightens us but whose otherness will teach us a great deal more about the world than we know at the present time.
Christmas calls us to take our lives and break them open at the crib where Jesus waits for us today. It may be a Christmas lesson for all of us. Tied up in our own little worlds, we may be missing the one Jesus came to save through us unless and until we reach out to it.
You are here
Her most recent book is The Friendship of Women: She is the founder and executive director of Benetvision: View the discussion thread. Sign up for our weekly newsletter. Skip to main content. Unwrap the gifts of Advent Christmas should be an attitude toward life, not an endurance exercise.