What Are You Waiting For?

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It’s come around again, that lovely liturgical season called Advent.  It is the time when, amidst all the activity of our lives, we strive to contemplate the meaning of waiting, the meaning of time itself, the meaning of the once and always arrival of the Christ into our world, into our lives.

I had never really given Advent a second thought before I joined the community; it was simply what I checked off before Christmas finally came.  Only within this Dominican frame of reference did I learn to sit with the dark days of December, to ask myself what was worth waiting for, to open myself to the Spirit of expectancy, of hope, of the mystery of “inbreaking.”

Years ago I was given these lines from a play by Christopher Fry which I use every Advent to focus my prayer awaiting the Word.  I invite you to wait with it too.

The human heart can go the lengths of God...
 Thank God our time is now when wrong
comes up to face us everywhere,
never to leave us till we take
The longest stride of soul [men] ever took.

Affairs are now soul size.
 The enterprise is exploration into God.

S. Priscilla Wood, OP
Dubuque, IA

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