Food for thought

Dec 11, 2014

The Virgin Mary has often been called “the woman of Advent.” One person who referred to her as such on Nov. 28, 2010 was then Pope, Benedict XVI.

He urged the crowd gathered for his Angelus address to “learn from her” and to “live a daily life with a new spirit, with feelings of profound expectation which only the coming of God can satisfy.”

In her case, she waited for her precious child. But we all wait for different things, Pope Benedict said, and it’s important to ask and answer at this time of year: “What am I waiting for? What, at this moment of my life, does my heart long for? And this same question can be posed at the level of the family, of the community, of the nation. What are we waiting for together? What unites our aspirations, what brings them together?”

The answer, the Pope said, can tell us a lot. He said, “Our moral and spiritual stature can be measured by what we wait for, by what we hope for.”

This hope is important, he said: “One could say that man is alive as long as he waits, as long as hope is alive in his heart.”