Food for thought

Dec 03, 2014

While messages at this time of year shout of joy, shopping, baking, parties, and on and on, it’s hard to remember that Advent is a “mini-Lent,” as some call it. We’re asked to examine ourselves, our behaviours, change those things that may be cumbersome on the road to salvation.

“The Advent season arrives as our annual wake-up call,” wrote Miami Archbishop Thomas G. Wenski, in a 2013 column about Advent last year.

“The liturgy of Advent is sober,” Archbishop Wenski said, “calling us to repentance and conversion.”

We have to examine the choices we have made, he wrote, “sinful choices that turn us away from the destiny to which [God] calls us.”If we don’t, “God will not only be ‘missing’ from our lives; He will not even be ‘missed,’” he wrote.

That’s why it’s important to look at the ways in which we can grow closer to God

“Advent reminds us that Christ wants to come to us – and, through us, he wants to come and live in our world,” Archbishop Wenski said. [God] continues to come among us, and knocks at the door of our hearts asking us: Are you willing to give me your flesh, your time, your life?"