Advent is our annual season for longing and waiting. Sometimes the thing the parish staff most longs for is the end of the holydays and all that extra work! Let's consider truthfully what it is we are waiting for this year.

Advent is upon us. Catholics and other Christians begin a "new year." People go up to the Lord's temple this weekend with a special sense of renewal and urgency at the beginning of this season of expectation. In the house of the Lord they hear of God's ways of justice and peace.

THE DEMISE OF the analog clock has probably affected the learning curve a little. But flashing digital displays still don’t offer to children or other fine people the precise meaning of time that goes along with merely knowing the numbers.

OUR HOUSE was broken into recently while my family and I slept soundly in our beds. We woke when we heard noise on the back porch, but it was too late. The thief was gone along with a purse filled with cash, credit cards, and keys. A hundred "if onlys" went through our heads.

We knew eventually it would happen again, but we never knew exactly when. When we moved into our bungalow we soon discovered that most of the basements on our block would flood whenever the rains fell too quickly--including ours.

Research tells us that more people suffer from light deprivation during winter months than we realize. Soon the sun will be at its lowest point in the sky. Dawn will come later and darkness will occur earlier. People who suffer from the lack of light quite often do not realize what is happening because the process of growing darkness creeps up.

The bible presents the spiritual quest in a number of metaphorical ways: as a journey, as a race, as a banquet. Today Isaiah portrays it as "climbing the Lord's mountain." This is a helpful image--climbing to loftier and loftier heights in a sometimes arduous trek.

Called together to worship in the house of God, we ask the Lord's pardon.

One will be taken, and one will be left. As in many parables, Jesus' way of describing the coming of the Son of Man contrasts two groups: those the flood destroyed versus Noah's family; two men in the field and two women grinding at the mill--one will be taken, and one will be left.

Advent has a twofold character: as a season to prepare for Christmas when Christ's first coming to us is remembered; as a season when that remembrance directs the mind and heart to await Christ's Second Coming at the end of time. --Roman Calendar, 1969