Today is the little-known traditional feast of the Expectation of the Blessed Virgin Mary. This is the celebration of Our Lady's pregnancy with Our Lord Jesus, a very pro-life day! May we keep the unborn in our prayers today.
O Blessed Mary, The Tabernacle of Tabernacles, Pray for Us!
It is also Ember Friday in Advent. May we today, and also tomorrow, Ember Saturday, offer greater prayers and sacrifices in anticipation of the True Christmas Gift, One which stands in contradiction to the materialism of this age....so much to sacrifice for....so many outrages in the common celebration of Christmas-so much to appease the Heart of Our Lord, lest it all be taken away, and indeed it very well may be....and soon! How much more can we expect Him to tolerate? From today's Introit:
"Thou art near, O Lord, and all Thy ways are truth: I have known from the beginning concerning Thy testimonies, and Thou art for ever. Blessed are the undefiled in the way: who walk in the law of the Lord."
Onto the continuation of our Advent meditations from the writings of Fr. Alfred Delp....He wrote the following words in Tegel Prison, Berlin, only two months before his martyrdom:
"Advent is a time of being deeply shaken, so that man will wake up to himself. The prerequisite for a fulfilled Advent is a renunciation of the arrogant gestures and tempting dreams with which, and in which, man is always deceiving himself. Thus he compels reality to use violence to bring him around, violence and much distress and suffering...
It is precisely in the severity of this awakening, in the helplessness of coming to consciousness, in the wretchedness of experiencing our limitations that the golden threads running between Heaven and earth during this season reach us...
Blessed is the era that can honestly claim that it is not a desert wilderness. Woe, however, to the era in which the voices calling in the wilderness have fallen silent...devastation will soon take over so horrendously on all sides that the scriptural reference to a desert wilderness will spontaneously occur to us all...
Such John the Baptist figures, forged by the lightning of mission and vocation, should never be lacking from life, not for a moment...
They have the great consolation that one can know only after having stepped beyond the deepest and most extreme limits of existence [keep in mind, these very words, Delp wrote while in a cold Nazi cell, struggling to write with his hands bound, after being brought before obscene, screaming judges flanked by enormous banners of swastikas, then beaten and tortured and now awaiting this mockery of a court's final decision-he knew the 'extreme limits' of which he spoke]...
They call man to face his last chance, because they already feel the ground trembling and the timbers creaking; and they see the steadfast mountains deeply quaking and even the stars of Heaven dangling insecurely...
Let us not shun and suppress the earnest words of the calling voices, or those who are our executioners today may be our accusers once again tomorrow, because we silenced the truth...
Advent is the time of the promise, not yet the fulfillment...
From out there, the first sounds are ringing out like shepherds' flutes and a boys' choir singing. They do not yet form a song or melody-it is all still too far off and only the first announcement and intimation. Still, it is happening. This is today..."
These last writings of this great priest and martyr are some of the most moving in the book-enough to meditate on for the rest of our lives [could YOU be one of those "calling voices?"]...one week till Christmas...and a few more excerpts to come....