Catherine's Cafe Vocation Blog

As a Dominican, I too have learned to love Advent.  The lights of Advent are especially encouraging.  Since I live in the northern hemisphere the sunlight is progressively less and less until the solstice, when we again can look forward to more and more of the sun’s light. Meantime we have the custom of lighting another candle each week, and neighbors all around are lighting the dark with green, red and blue lights. In morning prayer in our household (which also includes two more people on a free conference call), we read the Gospel for the coming Sunday. As we read the Gospel for this week and lit one candle, we read that we are baptized with fire.   We send one another out to be the fire of the Holy Spirit to give light to our world. We will also send one of our prayer group members to be with the Water Protectors at Standing Rock this week.   She joins thousands of others who are also on fire with the courage of the Great Spirit. How are each of u...

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...