How could our souls fail to be elevated by the liturgical texts of this season of Advent, so beautiful and so full of hope? The musical melodies so particular to this time of expectation have, moreover, the gift of appeasing our souls by inviting them to raise their desires beyond the purely natural realities to beseech the Savior, our divine Bridegroom, the only object of our most noble yearnings, to come without delay.
Dear friends and benefactors,
How could our souls fail to be elevated by the liturgical texts of this season of Advent, so beautiful and so full of hope? The musical melodies so particular to this time of expectation have, moreover, the gift of appeasing our souls by inviting them to raise their desires beyond the purely natural realities to beseech the Savior, our divine Bridegroom, the only object of our most noble yearnings, to come without delay.
Even the very word, “Advent”, expresses our present expectation. We are, indeed, wholly tending towards the arrival of our Savior, who will be born, bringing deliverance to our souls imprisoned in the web of our sins. Being essentially sinners, that is, rebellious beings who, in their foolish pride, rise unceasingly against God, we live in continual distress, in profound discomfort, because our sins lead us completely away from our end, our happiness.
Created by God, we are destined to manifest His glory in eternity. Born from His hands, our destiny is to return to Him by grace. Life here on earth should be considered as what it really is, a journey. It would be useless to seek in it the fulfillment of our being or our place of rest!
That is, however, what we usually do, because sin distorts our perspective. Too often we get bogged down in what is created, taking it as our end, when it is only a means. We put into it an eagerness which we could describe as ridiculous if it were not tragic, deviating us from the blessed eternity for which we are created! This sinking into the quicksand of the charms of creatures leaves a bitter taste in our souls and true peace flees far away from us. Our cunning attempts fail to appease this deep anxiety and a moment always comes when we find ourselves face to face with our own misery, overwhelmed by its burden.
May God turn this overwhelming pressure into a grace of conversion and not into an occasion of proud withdrawal into ourselves!
This painful face-to-face is in itself a grace. God tries to reach us, making us realize what our real worth is, obliging us, in this way, to turn towards Him and to say to Him in all truth: “Come, oh Lord, help me in my misery, for I perish under my faults. Without You, I can do nothing and I am worth nothing. Come!”
Habitually ignorant of the continual favors that God grants us and ungrateful before a goodness that is not wearied by our stupidity or our self-importance, we are hardly open to grace and remain confined within ourselves, in the vulgar and pitiable happiness of mindless imbeciles! But God loves us and eagerly seeks the love of our souls, stupidly filled with animal pleasures. Thus, He allows us to realize how vain are our desires and how necessary is His Presence and His personal intervention in our lives! Confronted with the reality of our extreme poverty, we are divinely constrained to give ourselves finally to Him.
Becoming a bit more conscious of our state, we dare to ask Him to come because, apart from Him, as we know by experience, there is only chaos – only He is “the way, the truth and life”. This entreaty becomes for us an obvious necessity and our prayer rises with insistence before the throne of Grace, asking Him to come and intervene.
Moreover, confronted with the terrible spectacle, both in the Church and in society, spread out before our tearful eyes, our prayers redouble in intensity and our hope rests wholly on His arrival and His intervention: “Come, oh Lord, do not delay, men are mad…”, or, as we would translate into Latin, “Veni Domine and noli tardare!”
Madness of a world that wallows increasingly in animal pleasures, madness of those who spread the poison of indifferentism in the Church, madness of these so-called religious celebrations which are nothing other than so many blasphemies, madness of the ecumenism that spreads its venom of relativism everywhere, madness of those noisy and coordinated declarations that try to make us believe that morals have changed and adapted to the fashions of the hour, madness of those theories that reduce man to the state of a beast by making him descend from a monkey – madnesses so widespread everywhere in the world that it is impossible for us to try to contradict them all without ourselves appearing mad!
“Come, oh Lord, to whom else could we go? You have the words of eternal Life.”
We must awaken, because in this Advent season we have to do something better than simply to deplore the widespread madness that reigns everywhere. Our hope is stronger than death and its henchmen. The Lord will come; He will not fail us. We do not doubt this. In fact, to be more exact, we do not want to doubt it, because there was a time when, grabbed by the sirens’ song of the world and of our fallen nature, we followed the lethal current that leads the world to its damnation and we offered to false gods the homage of our mercenary submission.
Our prayer becomes insistent and we are assured, against any human probability, of the victory of Christ who will come and defeat His enemies by establishing the kingdom of His divine Heart.
This is a time for joy, a joy that the world can neither understand nor give but which is ours, deeply rooted in our souls and our most powerful weapon to destroy – both within us and around us – the monsters of selfishness and sensuality.
Let us lift up our heads, for our deliverance is at hand; God comes to establish His Kingdom in us and through us. Let us lift up our heads and be humble so that the all-merciful God may find in our souls the beauty that charms Him, the beauty of our misery accepted and offered up, which is but a new manger where He will be able to rest!
In Christo sacerdote et Maria,
Fr. Yves le Roux