Slow down and savor the Advent season

November 25, 2013 | Advent

Advent is less than one week away. How will you make it special? Here’s a little something to get you in the spirit, my Advent In Focus story, which is running in the current issue of OSV Newsweekly:

By Mary DeTurris Poust

By the time Advent officially begins, most of us have been bombarded by so much Christmas music and Christmas advertising and Christmas everything that we’re already sick of the season. In a world where the Christmas countdown begins sometime before Halloween, it’s easy to lose sight of the beauty of Advent, and to get so caught up in the material trappings that we can’t see the spiritual forest for the tinsel-covered trees.

We live in a goal-oriented society, and in this case, Christmas is the end zone that we’re running toward at breakneck speed, hardly looking at what’s going on along the sidelines. But our faith beckons us to stop the madness, to stop the running, to focus on the journey as much as the destination. And to do that the Church gives us the four-week season of Advent, with its beautiful interplay of darkness and light, with its scriptural focus not only on the coming of the Christ Child but on the second coming of Jesus Christ, and with its quiet but constant insistence that we prepare — not just for a day but for a lifetime, and for the next life.

Continue reading HERE.

 

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