The First Week of Advent
November 28 - December 3, 2022
Monday
Matthew 8.5-11
A simple cry from my heart: Speak but the word and my soul will be healed. I experience the law of cause and effect daily in my life. O Lord, Your Word will cause all that You will. Your authority is absolute. You are Word and Authority. I await your Word and Authority in the silence of prayer that is submission in faith and humility. I am a wounded child of Your Kingdom: heal me. I come to Your table in the Kingdom that even now is, and is being prepared, for all those with faith, the new universal Israel. The feast of the Kingdom will be at your Coming-Again, You who already have come and who abide in me and I in you.
Tuesday
Luke 10.21-24
This Gospel Reading is the foundation of Catholic mystical, contemplative practice. In this Gospel Reading we are caught up into the Trinitarian life of God manifested in Jesus’ praying to the Father in the Spirit. We are called into knowing the Son and the Father by participating in the Father's and Son's mutual knowing through the love that is the Holy Spirit. The only obstacle is that I can count too much on my thinking myself wise and intellectual. I must be absolutely abandoned to the Holy Spirit. Let me, as a child, embrace the light that is in the wholeness of Church doctrine. Then in that obedience of faith, allow the Spirit to lead me in Jesus to the Center who is the Father.
Wednesday
Matthew 15.29-37
The God of Israel constantly shows his love for his people in the desert. Thus the desert fathers taught that to follow Jesus in the contemplative path is to dwell in the desert. Jesus gathers together the people in the desert to heal them and to feed them. The silent, quiet prayer of unknowing places us in the desert. But faith must make present Jesus with us in the desert. We must wait upon his healing and be fed with the bread of life even in the solitude of the desert. If he has compassion on the crowd what must be his personal love for each one of us with our own individual needs and stories crying out for his love and for the Light that Advent promises.
Thursday
Matthew 7.21, 24-27
The rock of our spiritual life is hearing the word of Jesus and putting the word into inward and outward practice. Hearing the word is to receive the word more and more deeply into the levels of our consciousness. It is to allow the word to be a seed that issues into love. The word of Jesus planted in the heart becomes love. Then the building block of the word begins to form our behavior. Slowly our way of thinking, speaking and acting is changed. We have become a house built on rock. Inwardly and outwardly our house stands against all that threatens it. The Kingdom is to hear and do the will of the Father in heaven. Thus we live in God's house built on rock.
Friday
Matthew 9. 27-31
Is it possible that there is conflict between the word of Jesus and movement of the Spirit? Jesus says that the men cured of their blindness should remain quiet about what had happened to them. The men now able to see by the power of Jesus proclaim the word about him throughout the whole area. Their preaching when ordered to be still is not a conflict but a complementary process. We live in the silence of our prayer and of our submission to the light of Jesus which shines into our blindness. But we cannot hide the light under a bushel. It will shine forth. We are willing to be silent and still, hidden in prayer. But at the same time we are willing to be messengers of the light in the ministries that fall to us within the Church. We fulfill the complementary process of contemplation and mission. To be contemplative is to be in mission.
Saturday
Matthew 9.35 – 10.1, 6-8
The gift you have received must in turn become a gift for others otherwise it ceases to be gift. The life of God is to give life and existence in creation and redemption. The gift that is the Kingdom of God cannot become a commodity of our own spiritual satisfaction. Sharing in the harvest means becoming a laborer of the harvest. Harvested we are now workers of the harvest. The heart of God moved with compassion bestows authority on the Apostles. Kingdom, harvest, laborers, Apostles: all these imply authority. The Church, the gift of God among us, comes with authority, as a rock upon which we can rest. This rock of doctrine alive in faith allows us to go deeply into the remembrance of the Christ Jesus, Lord, which is the gift of contemplation. Advent: Come, Lord Jesus, come!
William Fredrickson, OBLSB, D.Min.
--
