Advent Expectations

Advent is coming to a close. Sunday will more likely be seen as a Christmas celebration than as the 4th Sunday in Advent. But Inward/Outward had a post yesterday that reminds us that, as I see it, we are always living in a time of Advent- waiting for his coming. It's from Evelyn Underhill, a remarkable and deeply spiritual writer of the 20th Century. Read it slowly and let it move you closer to His Coming.

As we draw near Christmas, the sense of our own need and of the whole world’s need of God’s coming–never greater perhaps than it is now–becomes more intense…. We seem to hear the voice of the whole suffering creation saying, ‘Come! Give us wisdom, give us light, deliver us, liberate us, lead us, teach us how to live. Save us.’ And we, joining in that prayer, unite our need with the one need of the whole world. We have to remember that the answer to the prayer was not a new and wonderful world order but Bethlehem and the Cross; a life of complete surrender to God’s will; and we must expect this answer to be worked out in our own lives in terms of humility and sacrifice.

If our lives are ruled by this spirit of Advent, this loving expectation of God, they will have a quality quite different from that conventional piety. For they will be centered on an entire and conscious dependence upon the supernatural love which supports us; hence all self-confidence will be destroyed in them and replaced by perfect confidence in God.
Source: The Fruits of the Spirit