Happy New Year… as we begin a new church calendar year with the season of Advent. It is a season that can easily be forgotten as our culture focuses on Christmas and the birth of our savior almost 2000 years ago. But this is a season where we are called to identify our deepest yearnings and desires. Christ came to save us from our sins, but do we eagerly yearn for the holiness that Christ offers to us.? Christ came to reconcile us with the Father and to provide eternal life in heaven. But do we deeply yearn to live with God in heaven for all eternity? Saint Augustine stated that God has made us for himself and that our hearts will be restless until they rest eternally with God in heaven. This ultimate truth reminds us of why there is always some level of dissatisfaction in our lives. The new home is wonderful, the new car is beautiful, the new love is exciting, etc. … but eventually the “fullness” that we feel will fade. We experience an incompleteness and restlessness. As Augustine wrote: Our hearts are restless until they rest in God. Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life towards this ultimate end. Do we yearn for Christ and what he offers to us? The question for us as we begin this season of Advent.
Our yearning should grounded in a spirit of hope and confidence. As Saint Paul states in Romans 8, if God is for us who can be against us. Pope Benedict in his encyclical about hope, Spe et salvi¸ wrote that we can have all sorts of “little” hopes but without the “big” hope who is God, we really do not have hope:
Benedict: The human being needs unconditional love. He needs the certainty which makes him say: “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom 8:38- 39). If this absolute love exists, with its absolute certainty, then—only then—is man “redeemed”, whatever should happen to him in his particular circumstances. This is what it means to say: Jesus Christ has “redeemed” us.  In this sense it is true that anyone who does not know God, even though he may entertain all kinds of hopes, is ultimately without hope, without the great hope that sustains the whole of life (cf. Eph 2:12). Man's great, true hope which holds firm in spite of all disappointments can only be God—God who has loved us and who continues to love us “to the end,” until all “is accomplished” (cf. Jn 13:1 and 19:30).

Daniel Berrigan wrote an Advent creed of hope. Let me share with you his words:
It is not true that creation and the human family are doomed to destruction and loss—This is true: For God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have everlasting life;

• It is not true that we must accept inhumanity and discrimination, hunger and poverty, death and destruction This is true: I have come that they may have life, and that abundantly.
• It is not true that violence and hatred should have the last word, and that war and destruction rule forever—
  This is true: Unto us a child is born, unto us a Son is given, and the government shall be upon his shoulder, his name shall be called wonderful councilor, mighty God, the Everlasting, the Prince of peace.
• It is not true that we are simply victims of the powers of evil who seek to rule the world— This is true: To me is given authority in heaven and on earth, and lo I am with you, even until the end of the world.
• It is not true that we have to wait for those who are specially gifted, who are the prophets of the Church before we can be peacemakers—This is true: I will pour out my spirit on all flesh and your sons and daughters shall prophesy, your young men shall see visions and your old men shall have dreams.
• It is not true that our hopes for liberation of humankind, of justice, of human dignity of peace are not meant for this earth and for this history—This is true: The hour comes, and it is now, that the true worshipers shall worship God in spirit and in truth.

So let us enter Advent in hope, even hope against hope. Let us see visions of love and peace and justice. Let us affirm with humility, with joy, with faith, with courage: Jesus Christ—the life of the world.

Mark Searle wrote an article titled “The Spirit of Advent.” The article is a good introduction to the season of Advent which begins tomorrow for the Church.

Human beings cannot live without hope. Unlike the animals we are blesse – or cursed – with the ability to think about the future and to fear our actions to shaping it. So essential is this to human life, that human beings cannot live without hope, without something to live for, without something to look forward to. To be without hope, to have nothing to live for, is to surrender to death in despair. But we can find all sorts of things to live for and we can hope for almost anything: for some measure of success or security or for the realization of some more or less modest ambition; for our children, that they might be saved from our mistakes and sufferings and find a better life than we have known; for a better world, throwing ourselves into politics or medicine or technology so that future generations might be better off. Not all these forms of hope are selfish; indeed, they have given dignity and purpose to the lives of countless generations.

But one of the reasons whey we read the Old Testament during Advent is to learn what to hope for. The people of the Old Testament had the courage to hope for big things: that the desert would be turned into fertile land that their scattered and divided people would eventually be gathered again; that the blind would see, the deaf hear, the lame walk; that not only their people, but all the peoples of the earth, would be united in the blessings of everlasting peace. Clearly, their hopes were no different than ours or from any human being’s: lasting peace, tranquil lives, sufficiency of food, an end to suffering, pain, and misery.

Thus, we hope for the same things as the Old Testament people, for their hopes are not yet realized. But we differ from them in two ways. First, the coming of Jesus in history, as a partial fulfilment of God’s promises, immeasurably confirms and strengthens our hope. Secondly, we differ from Old Testament people because Jesus has revealed to us that God is not far off, but is already in our midst, Hence the importance in the Advent liturgy of John the Baptist and of Mary;: because they recognized the new situation, they serve as models for the Church in discerning the presence of our Savior in the world.