"Gaudete" by Karl Rahner

[[As the Autumn season fades and the Winter takes over, the world becomes still. Everything around us turns pale and drab. It chills us. We are least inclined to hectic activities. More than in other seasons of the year, we prefer to stay at home and be alone. It is as if the world had become subsued and lost the courage to assert its self-satisfaction, the courage to be proud of its power and its life. Its progressive growth in the swelling fullness of the Spring and Summer has faded, for the fullness has vanished, In this season, time itself bears eloquent witness to its own poverty. It disappoints us.

Here is the moment to conquer the melancholy of time, here is the moment to say softly and sincerely what we know by faith:"Gaudete, let us rejoice. I believe in the eternity of God who has entered into our time, my time. Beneath the wearisome coming and going of chronological time, life that no longer knows death is already secretly growing. It is already here, it is already in me, precisely because I believe."

Time is no longer the bleak, empty, fading succession of moments, one moment destroying the preceding one and causing it to become "past," only to die away itself, clearing the way for the future that presses --- itself already mortally wounded. Time itself is redeemed. It possesses a centre that can preserve the present and gather itself into the future, a nucleus that fills the present with the future that is already effected, a focal point that coordinates the living present with the eternal furure. The advent of the incarnate God, of the Christ who is the same yesterday, and today, and in eternity --- this advent has penetrated into this time that is to be redeemed.

A "now" of eternity is in you. And this "now" has already begun to gather together your earthly moments into itself. For into your heart comes the One who is himself Advent, the Boundless Future who is already in the process of coming, the Lord himself who has already come into the time of the flesh to redeem it.]]

From The Eternal Year, by Karl Rahner