Dear Parish Family,
 
At the beginning of a new Liturgical Year, (Cycle A, No. 783 in our New G&P Hymn Book), the liturgy invites us to renew our proclamation to all the peoples and sums it up in two words “God comes”. These words, so concise, contain an ever new evocative power. It is not used in the past tense — God has come, — nor in the future — God will come, — but in the present: “God comes!” This is a continuous present, that is, an ever-continuous action: it happened, it is happening now and it will happen again. In whichever moment, “God comes”. This reveals to us God’s nature. Proclaiming that “God comes” is equivalent, therefore, to simply announcing God himself, through one of his essential and qualifying features: his being the God-who-comes.
Advent calls us believers to become aware of this truth and to act accordingly. It rings out as a salutary appeal in the days, weeks and months that repeat: Awaken! Remember that God comes! Not yesterday, not tomorrow, but today, now! His “coming” is motivated by the desire to free us from evil and death, from all that prevents our true happiness. God comes to save us. In the first part of Advent, the accent falls on the expectation of the Lord’s Final Coming, as the texts of this Sunday’s readings demonstrate. With Christmas approaching, the dominant note instead is on the commemoration of the event at Bethlehem, so that we may recognize it as the “fullness of time”. Between these two “manifested” comings it is possible to identify a third, which St Bernard calls “intermediate” and “hidden”, and which occurs in the souls of believers and, as it were, builds a “bridge” between the first and the last coming.
The archetype for that coming of Christ, which we might call a “spiritual incarnation”, is always Mary. Just as the Virgin Mother pondered in her heart on the Word made flesh, so every individual soul and the entire Church are called during their earthly pilgrimage to wait for Christ who comes and to welcome him with faith and love ever new.
If Jesus is present there no longer exists any time that is without meaning, thus empty. If He is present, we can continue to hope even when others can no longer assure us of support, even when the present becomes difficult. Advent comes to remind us that what the human heart most deeply desires: love relationship with God without a time limit.  God began to fulfill this longing in most tangible way in the first Advent—the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. And what God has begun in Christ Jesus, God will complete—if those touched by this good news allow themselves to be used by him as agents of His peace. Thus it is a time of the presence and the expectation in the eternal, and exactly for this reason, it is... the time of joy, an internalized joy that no suffering can negate Let us therefore begin this new Advent — a time granted to us by the Lord of time — by reawakening in our hearts the expectation of the God-who-comes and the hope that his Name will be hallowed, that his Kingdom of justice and peace will come, that his will be done on earth as it is in Heaven.
Fr. Tom Kunnel C.O.