Preparing for Advent: A Journey into Prayer and Watchfulness, A Homily with Father Dom

The name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Well, happy first Sunday of Advent. This truly is a wonderful time, one of my most favorite times of the year, and so we enter into the season, recognizing some changes. Right, there was no Gloria that's proclaimed because we're entering into a time of preparation, a time of penance, prayer, fasting, abstinence. It sounds a little bit like Lent, doesn't it? Well, you may know that a long time ago in the church, that this time was called Saint Martin's Lent. It started on his feast day, on November 11th, and went all the way to Christmas, and it was a time just like Lent a fasting and prayer and almsgiving. Later in the church, probably most recently, it has been downgraded to just four weeks, but in these four weeks, I encourage you to fast and to pray. That's why we wear purple or violet meaning of penance, time of penance and time of preparation. We have the Ann Vett candle here, with the four candles representing hope, peace and joy. There's many things that the church provides for us to get ready. The meaning of Advent is wrapped into the etymology of the word Adventus, which means the coming, a preparation for the coming. So what are we preparing for? We're definitely preparing for the memorial of God's birth, also remembering God incarnate, one of the most powerful things that has ever happened inside space and time God taking on flesh, becoming one of us, fully God and fully man. So we're remembering these two beautiful doctrines and dogmas of the church. But what does that mean for us today? In Advent, we also prepare for what the second coming of Christ. That's what we're preparing for and Advent helps us remind us of that. Also, there was the sprinkling right, reminding us of our baptism, the most powerful and beautiful sacrament that God gives us. Original sin is wiped away, we're brought into the family of God, jesus Christ's doors of his church are open and we get to receive the graces of the sacrament. Every movement of the liturgy through Advent has meaning and purpose, every word. So let us enter deeply into this Advent season, pray fast, give up something, prepare yourselves for the coming of Christ. As I go through our readings today, I'm reminded of something that's most important to us Today. I'm reminded of something that's most necessary in our spiritual life. After baptism, the most powerful thing in our lives is prayer. If you don't pray, you'll never know God. You have to pray. So in the midst of Advent. Double down on your prayer, triple down on your prayer, fast and pray. Prayers are essential. Many of the saints speak, all the saints speak about, but everything the saints say it's all about prayer. So I'd like to dive just a little deeply into prayer. What that is, what that looks like, what that means for us. One of the good things we can do during Advent is we enter into the new liturgical years, that we can go back to the fundamentals. We can go back to the basics, like a good athlete does, going back to the fundamentals and foundations of what makes that athlete good. And for us, as being spiritual athletes, it's prayer that's the foundation of what we do. So let's look at prayer. Let us turn to the holy catechism of the Catholic Church. Great is the mystery of the faith. The church professes this mystery in the Apostles Creed and celebrates it in the sacramental liturgy, so that the life of the faithful may be conformed to Christ and the Holy Spirit, to the glory of God the Father. This mystery, then, requires that the faithful believe in it, that they celebrate it and that they live from it in a vital and personal relationship with the living and true God. That is relationship in prayer. Saint Therese of the Ziocese says this about prayer For me, prayer is a surge of the heart. It is a simple look toward heaven. It is a cry of recognition and of love, embracing both trial and joy. Saint John Damascene says this prayer is the rising of one's mind and heart to God or the requesting of good things from God. But when we pray, do we speak from the height of our pride and will or out of the depths of a humble and contrite heart? Saint Augustine said that he who humbles himself will be exalted. Humility is the foundation of prayer. Only when we humbly acknowledge that we do not know how to pray as we ought are we ready to receive freely the gift of prayer. And another quote by Saint Augustine man is a beggar before God and your prayer beg to our Lord. Oh only if you knew the gift of God in prayer. The wonder of prayer is revealed beside the well where we come seeking water. There Christ comes to meet every human being. It is he who first seeks us and asks us for a drink. Jesus thirsts. His asking arises from the depths of God's desire for us. Whether we realize it or not, prayer is the encounter of God's thirst for us God thirsts that we may thirst for Him. You would have asked Him and he would have given you living water. Paradoxically, our prayer of petition is a response to the plea of the living God. They have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewn out of cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that cannot hold water. He's talking about those who do not pray, but prayer is the response of faith, one of the theological virtues we get at baptism. You can't get it anywhere else, only in baptism and we have that. Prayer is the response of faith to the free promise of salvation and also a response of love to the thirst of the only Son of God. Where does prayer come from? Whether prayer is expressed in words or gestures, it is the whole human who prays. But in naming the source of prayer, scripture speaks sometimes of the soul or the spirit, but most often of the heart. More than a thousand times, according to Scripture, it is the heart that prays. If our heart is far from God, the words of our prayer are in vain. The heart is the dwelling place where the great I AM lives. According to the Semitic or biblical expression, the heart is the place to which I withdraw. The heart is our hidden center, beyond the grasp of our reason and of others. Only the Spirit of God can fathom the human heart and truly know it. The heart is the place of decision deeper than our psychic desires. It is the place of truth, where we choose life or death. It is the place of encounter, because as image of God we live in relation. It is the place of covenant. And listen to our first sentence from our first reading today. Isaiah says you, lord, are our Father, our Redeemer. You are named forever. Why do you let us wander, o Lord, from our ways and harden our hearts so that we fear you not? Prayer is a place of the heart. Do not harden your hearts. Christian prayer truly is a covenantal relationship between God and man in Jesus Christ. It is the action of God and of man springing forth from both the Holy Spirit and ourselves, wholly directed to the Father and union with the human will of the Son of God, made man in the flesh. And at the end of that reading we hear Yet, o Lord, you are our Father, we are the clay, you are the potter, we are all the work of your hands, god, god, we can do nothing. And the new covenant, prayer is the living relationship of the children of God with their father, who is good beyond all measure, with his son Jesus Christ, and with the Holy Spirit. The grace of the kingdom is the union of the entire holy and royal trinity with the whole human spirit. Thus, the life of prayer is the habit of being in the presence of the thrice holy God and in communion with him. This communion of life is always possible because through baptism we have already been united with Christ. Prayer is Christian insofar as it is communion with Christ and extends throughout the church, which is his body. Its dimensions are those of Christ's love for you. That's just scratching the surface of what 2,000 years of church history can put before us about prayer. Dive deeply into it, learn about it and don't tell me you don't have time to pray. Remember that story I told you of when I was with my spiritual director in seminary and I was doing 21, 22 credit hours and I told my spiritual director who asked me do you pray? And I said no. He said why? I said because I don't have time. You know what he said to me? He says no, you don't have love, and then twist the knife. He was right. You have time every day to pray Every day. If you're retired or if you've got 15 kids, you have time. When you just carve out 10, 15 seconds a minute, god will give you five minutes. Trust me, it's supernatural. Prayer is supernatural. Enter into it. I'd like to end by rereading our gospel today, but by switching a few words. Jesus in our gospel today says watch three or four times, and I want to change that word to prayer in that gospel. And here it is. Jesus said to his disciples be prayerful, be alert. You do not know when the time will come. It is like a man traveling abroad he leaves home and places his servants in charge, each with his own work, and orders the gatekeeper to be on the prayerful watch. Prayer, pray. Therefore. You do not know when the Lord of the house is coming, whether in evening or at midnight, or at cock crow or in the morning. May he not come suddenly and find you not praying. What I say to you, I say to all pray In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.