Watchfulness (Advent)

By Fr. Conor Donnelly

(Proofread)

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

St. Paul, speaking to the Thessalonians, says, “But you, brothers, do not live in the dark, that the day should take you unawares like a thief. No, you are all children of light and children of the day. We do not belong to the night nor to darkness, so we should not go on sleeping as everyone else does, but stay wide awake and sober.”

The words of St. Paul are like an invitation for us to be watchful. To be watchful is to love.

In one of the Entrance Antiphons of these days, it says, “Behold, the Lord will come in all His splendor, to give His people peace and bring them eternal life.”

Our Lord is coming to visit us, to bring us peace, and to give us the eternal life promised from of old. He wants to find us like the good servant who does not fall asleep during his master's absence but, rather, when the Master returns is found at his post, devoted to his duty.

We're told in St. Luke, “What I say to you, I say to all: watch.” It's one of the catchphrases of this period of Advent. These words are addressed to all men of all times, the words that Our Lord speaks to each one of us, because we can tend to be comfort-seeking and tend towards drowsiness.

“We cannot allow our hearts,” says Our Lord in St. Luke, “to become dulled with gluttony and drunkenness and the cares of this life.”

And St. Paul continues when speaking to the Thessalonians, “Night is the time for sleepers to sleep, and night is the time for drunkards to be drunk. But we belong to the day in which we should be sober. Let us put on faith and love for a breastplate and the hope of salvation for a helmet. God destined us not for His retribution but to win salvation through Our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us so that, awake or asleep, we should still live united to Him. Encourage each other and keep strengthening one another as you do already.”

We're invited to stay very much awake so that we don't lose our supernatural outlook; that supernatural outlook that should give life to everything that we do.

Our Lord is coming and we're called to await His arrival with a vigilant spirit. We shouldn't be fearful like people caught doing wrong. We shouldn't be distracted like those who place their heart entirely in earthly goods.

Each time that we come to detect that the world is super-focused on material realities as we come towards Christmas, we can make a resolution to be a little more spiritual, a little more focused on Bethlehem, and on all the messages that are there for us.

As we move with the Holy Family on that journey towards Bethlehem, we can be attentive and cheerful like eager people who expect a long-awaited loved one. Keeping watch is above all a matter of loving: keeping watch in our interior life; keeping watch in our spirit of mortification and sacrifice, in our virtue of generosity, in our virtue of service, in our attentiveness to the needs of other people; keeping watch in our charity, in our patience, in our kindness.

At the same time, we may have difficulties in keeping our love awake, because there's selfishness, there's a lack of mortification or temperance that always threaten to extinguish the flame that Our Lord lights time and again in our hearts.

When we see the world around us being intemperate, it's a reminder to us to practice this virtue in all things. Temperance, which means control, often requires a little bit less of what we like, a little more of what we don't like, so we keep ourselves in good shape.

We need constantly to revive that flame, to shake ourselves out of any repetitive routine, to struggle. In the Old Testament we're told, “The life of man on earth is a battle.” It's a struggle.

St. Paul compares this watchfulness to the well-armed soldier on guard duty: “Be vigilant, stay firm in the faith, be brave and strong.” He doesn't allow himself to be taken by surprise.

The first Christians repeated frequently and lovingly the aspiration, “Come, Lord Jesus.” The Responsorial Psalm of these days repeats those words for us.

Through practicing their faith in this way, those faithful members of the Church found the interior strength and optimism that they needed if they were to fulfill their family and social duties. At the same time, they detached themselves interiorly from earthly goods, with the mastery that comes from the hope of eternal life.

Nothing in this world really matters, nothing is really worth having, if it's not as a means to possess that eternal life.

Our Lord also tells us that our meeting with Him need not come unexpectedly for the Christian who has been on the watch. For that person, He will not come “like a thief in the night.”

There will be no surprises, because there will already be many meetings with Him each day; meetings in the sacraments and in the ordinary happenings of the day which have been full of love and friendship.

The Church prays, “In your goodness, Lord, listen to your people's prayer. We rejoice at your Son's coming in human form like our own. Grant that when He comes again in majesty, we may receive the reward of eternal life.”

Our vigilance has to be in the little things of each day: in the care of our prayer, in the care of our examination of conscience, in those little acts of self-denial which keep us alert and in good shape like a good athlete.

We need to be on our guard not only against God's enemies but also against the complicity offered by our evil inclinations, because we know we’re weak. “Watch and pray that you may not enter into temptation,” we're told in St. Matthew.

We find we're entering into a lot of temptations. It may be that we're not watching and praying as much as we should. “The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.”

Our Lord wants us to work on that flesh; to make it stronger, tougher, more alert. We're alert when we make an effort to improve our personal prayer, which in turn increases our desire for holiness and helps us to avoid any lukewarmness.

We will also stay awake to the things of God by living a spirit of mortification. Advent is a time when we can work a little bit and begin again in that spirit of penance and mortification.

We strengthen our vigilance by doing a careful examination of conscience, so that we do not fall into the situation as though described by God. St. Augustine, in one of his sermons, says, “For while you give yourself up to evil, you come to consider yourself good. because you do not take the trouble to look at yourself. You reproach others and you do not take stock of yourself. You accuse others and you do not examine yourself. You place them before your very eyes and you place yourself behind your back. So when the time comes for me to reckon with you, I should do the opposite. I will turn you around and confront you with yourself. Then you will see yourself and you will weep.”

We can ask Our Lord that our vigilance might be in the little things that fill up our day. We are told in The Way: “That supernatural mode of conduct is a truly military tactic. You carry on the war—the daily struggles of your interior life—far from the main walls of your fortress. And the enemy meets you there: in your small mortifications, your customary prayer, your methodical work; your plan of life: and only with difficulty will he come close to the easily scaled battlements of your castle. And if he does come, he comes exhausted.”

If in our examination of conscience, we consider the little things of each day, we will find the true way and will discover the root causes of our failings in love of God. Little things generally open the way to big things.

Our daily meditation can keep us on the lookout for the enemy, who never sleeps. He's awake 24-7. That lookout and watchfulness will give us the strength to bear and to overcome temptations and difficulties.

In our meditation, we also find the means to struggle against the ‘old person’, those less-than-upright tendencies that remain latent within us.

Maybe the Holy Spirit will give us greater lights during this period of Advent and of penance, to see ourselves as we are before God with all our miseries and with all our nothingness.

To achieve this necessary interior purification we need to practice constant mortification of our memory, of our imagination.

If we do this, we'll be able to eliminate from our understanding those troublesome things that prevent us from carrying out the will of God to the full.

On these days and hours before Christmas, we could try to tone up our interior purification so that we can receive Christ with a clean mind. We can try to get rid of anything that goes against or does not belong to our way.

Lord, help me to see the places where I'm negligent. It may not be that we commit mortal sins or venial sins; it may be, but we should look at the places where we're negligent, where we could have been better.

Those things that we say in the “I Confess” every day in the Mass; the things that we fail to do, our omissions, because God is hoping for more from each one of us. If we try to clean out those things from our mind, then our mind will no longer have anything in them that does not belong to Our God.

In The Way, we're told, “That joke, that witty remark held on the tip of your tongue; the cheerful smile for those who annoy you; that silence when you're unjustly accused; your friendly conversation with people whom you find boring and tactless; the daily effort to overlook one irritating detail or another in the persons who live with you...this, with perseverance is indeed solid interior mortification.”

May Our Lord help us to see this. We do need that solid interior mortification. And that purification of the soul through interior mortification is not something merely negative.

It's not just a matter of avoiding what borders on sin; quite the opposite. It consists of knowing how to deprive oneself, for love of God, of the things that it would be quite licit to have.

This mortification, which tends to purify the mind of everything that is not God, aims in the first place at freeing the memory from recollections that would oppose the way that leads to heaven. Those memories can assault us during our work or our rest, or even while we're praying. Promptly, without violence, we can apply the means to get rid of them: an act of presence of God, a turning to Our Lady, invoking of our guardian angel or of St. Michael.

We have all the means. We'll struggle to make the effort that is necessary for our mind to fill itself once more with love, and a longing for the things of God.

As we look into the mind and heart of St. Joseph and Our Lady these days, those are the sort of sentiments that we find there: that love and longing for the things of God, a total self-giving, what God has asked of them, whole heart and mind, complete focus.

Something similar can happen with our imagination. It can upset us by inventing all kinds of novels or weaving fantastic fictions which are quite useless. Our interior purification can also involve that control of the imagination.

We're told in The Way, “Get rid of those useless thoughts which, at best, are but a waste of time.” The devil may try to fill our minds with useless thoughts.

While we try to read things that are useful, we also have to try and think things that are useful. Don't waste your time thinking about useless things. Be very focused effective, use your time well. We have to react quickly in those situations and return serenely to our ordinary task.

Interior purification does not end with just emptying the understanding of useless thoughts. It goes much further. Mortification of our talents and abilities opens up to us the way to contemplative life, in whatever circumstances God has wanted to place us. He wants us to know how to be contemplative there, like Our Lady pondering all these things carefully in our hearts.

With that interior silence towards everything that goes against God's wishes and is improper to His children, a soul finds itself well-disposed for a continuous and intimate dialogue with Jesus Christ.

Lord, help us to see everything in our life, in our mind, in our imagination that might go against your wishes. Help us to listen to the whisperings of the Holy Spirit as He points things out to us.

In that dialogue, our imagination can help our contemplation. When we contemplate the Gospel or the mysteries of the Holy Rosary, it's then that our memory can recall the wonders that God has done for us, His abundant goodness. That will cause our hearts to burn with gratitude and ardent love.

When the Holy Family went to Bethlehem, a difficult journey full of self-renunciation, we can imagine that their hearts were burning with gratitude and ardent love. They saw the beautiful things that God had done in them and through them. “My soul magnifies the Lord. My spirit rejoices in God my Savior.”

The Advent liturgy repeats the urgent message many times: The Lord is coming and we have to prepare a broad path for Him; a clean heart. “Create a clean heart in me, O God.”

In our prayer today we could make specific resolutions to empty our hearts of anything that is displeasing to God.

We could make a resolution to purify our hearts through mortification and fill them with the love of God while constantly showing our affection for Our Lord. That's what Our Lady and St. Joseph did on their journey.

We do this in the same way as they did, by saying aspirations, making spiritual communions, making many acts of love and atonement, invoking the Holy Family, offering this little difficulty or contradiction or pain to help the Holy Family on their journey, to help them reach Bethlehem. We give them the spiritual input that moves them along their way.

If we prepare in this way for the coming of the Christ Child, then many of the souls around us can benefit from the effort that we make to prepare a worthy dwelling place for Our Lord in our crib, in our family, in our soul. We can say to many of those who walk along the same paths as we do what is so simply expressed in that old poem: “I know of a smooth path by which one can reach God, holding tight to Our Lady's hand.”

We ask Our Lady to let us walk throughout our lives, to help us to “walk in love” as St. Paul says to the Ephesians.

I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

DWM