A New Year Begins: Week 1; Advent 2007

To everyone who visits these pages, I extend my sincerest wishes for a wonderful and very prayerful and fruitful Advent! We rejoice that ours is a God who, while completely self-sufficient in and of himself, and in need of no one or nothing outside himself, has also chosen from the beginning not to remain alone. Going out of himself, he creates the cosmos, and emptying himself of his divine prerogatives he wills the free response of those who would be his own; he creates, allows (and summons) that creation to evolve to greater and greater levels of complexity, rejoices as humanity-on-the-way-to-God comes to be, calls out of this humanity a special people who would be his in a special way, and waits for One to come out of this people who will incarnate his Word as uniquely beloved Son.



In Advent we prepare for the coming of this One, the Christ who reveals (makes known and makes real in space and time) true and authentic humanity marking us as called by name and capable of calling upon God in the same way. He is the one who exhaustively embodies the mutual story we call the Kingdom of God, the shared covanental destiny of God and humanity worked out in history. He is the one we know as Jesus, and the God he makes known is the One who comes amongst us in weakness and lowliness. May your preparations this year be fruitful and profound, and may you come more and more in your own lives to be drawn fully into the story of this One we call Messiah.