Advent Reflections

Each day in Advent, you will receive an email from St. Barnabas with words and images to invite your engagement with the season’s themes of longing and hope, preparation and expectation, listening and silence. Many of the images will not be traditional “religious” art. Advent calls us to notice the signs of God in unexpected places.   We invite you to prayerfully contemplate the images and absorb the words. Consider returning to them at various times during the day, letting them speak into the moment. Perhaps you will hear a word meant just for you.

‌

December 1st, 2019

Leonardo da Vinci, Adoration of the Magi , 1481 (unfinished )

Ask not, doubt not. You have, my heart, already chosen the joy of Advent. As a force against your own uncertainty, bravely tell yourself, “It is the Advent of the great God.” Say this with faith and love, and then both the past of your life, which has become holy, and your life’s eternal, boundless future will draw together in the now of this world. For then into the heart comes the One who is Advent, the boundless future who is already in the process of coming, the Christ, who has already come into the time of the flesh to redeem it.                                                                               ­­–– Karl Rahner, S. J.