Advent Offering Today

Winter, 2009

I want to share with you this Christmas Novena sent to me by the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology.

It is said that this novena was traditionally prayed 15 times a day from the Feast of Saint Andrew, the
Apostle, November 30, until Christmas.  Praying it along with my other prayers seems a reasonable way to incorporate this into my Advent devotions.  And as it was offered to me so I offer it to you.

Hail and blessed be

The hour and moment 

In which the Son of God

was born of the
Most pure Virgin Mary,

At midnight, in Bethlehem,

In the piercing cold.

I beseech Thee, 

O my God, 

To hear my prayers and

grant my desires,

[there mention your request]

Through the merits of 

Our Savior Jesus Christ,

and of His Blessed Mother.

Amen.

Wishing you all a grand day and may all your prayers be fulfilled in their asking!

~~~^j^~~~

Thanks be to God!

Advent, the Journey

The Journey Begins on Page ONE

It is a grand time of the year.  Again I am offered a chance to reflect on the past and pursue the future in the celebration of Advent.  One of the books I like to use during this season is Advent and Christmas ~Wisdom from G. K. Chesterton, edited by the Center for the Study of C. S. Lewis and Friends.

It is currently said that hope goes with youth, and lends to your its wings of a butterfly; but I fancy that hope is the last gift given to man, and the only gift not given to youth...But the power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged; God has kept that good wine until now.  IT is from the backs of the elderly gentlemen that the wings of the butterfly should burst.

Charles Dickens: Last of the Great Men

G. K. Chesterton

It is a great source of inspiration and it challenges me to actively enter into the season.  This is a season of hope and that is what I have found to be most important to me of late.  And so it is that I look to  Advent seeing it as a season full of Hope.

~~~^j^~~~

Thanks be to God!

The Rosary

The rosary is my favorite prayer.  A marvelous prayer!  Marvelous in its simplicity and in its depth.  In the prayer we repeat many times the words that the Virgin Mary heard from the Archangel, and from her kinswoman Elizabeth.  (Address, Rome, 1978) ~~Pope John Paul II, His Essential Wisdom, Edited by Carol Kelly-Gangi

 ~~~^j^~~~

My favorite prayer too.  

Thanks be to God!