FAITH MATTERS

The Season of Advent begins this Sunday, November 28th

Road Map to the Manger 

The continuing conversation this year is about ‘roadmaps’: finding pathways to healthy, safe ways of connecting – for everyone. Our Leaders entice us by offering small steps to an opening up, lightening hearts with the hope that all can be ‘home for Christmas’. But it is an opening up for which all of us are to engage in preparing – that all might know health, freedom and security.

The Advent Season, too, is our annual ‘roadmap’, as we wend our way towards the Christmas Manger. The weekly Word unfolds the kind of road God desires to shape, its destination and what our part in enabling it, that God’s desire comes to birth. Then, on arriving at the Manger, we will be at one with the Christchild, who modelled the Way for us – in His time, and for all time: the way of light, joy and peace.

Advent is a time of preparation. The Gospel of the first Sunday of Advent spells out the urgency of our time of preparation. Jesus describes it as a time when one person will be spared, another taken. It echoes the Australian experience of the bushfire season that is almost upon us. It is a time for preparation and for reflection, a time of seriousness. 

Today, however, the Australian context of Advent is the rush towards Christmas in which work presses hard, preparing for family celebrations (finally!) and perhaps holidays afterwards occupies the mind. It is a time when the ringing of cash registers is heard throughout the land. 

Advent offers us a time to find a moment of space in a busy world. Advent is a time for waiting, for discarding old and tired ways of living and for pondering new possibilities.

As we light the first of the Advent candles this weekend, we pray:

Heavenly Father, as we begin this Advent, give light to our eyes and peace to our hearts. May the Lord find us watching and waiting in joy when He comes. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.

Reverse Advent Calendar

Unlike a regular Advent Calendar where the focus is on receiving a treat every day, the Reverse Advent Calendar takes the focus off receiving and places the focus on giving to others. A Reverse Advent Calendar begins as an empty box. For 20 days in the lead up to Christmas you place one item (non-perishable food, toiletries, Christmas treat) into the box.

After 20 days your filled Reverse Advent Calendar is dropped off to the Parish Office where it will be distributed from the Good Kitchen to people in our immediate community who are experiencing food insecurity. A box has been placed in the School Chapel for those in our school community who would like to contribute. 

“For it is in giving that we receive” - St Francis of Assisi