The Holy Father highlighted two key attitudes that will help us have a good Advent: wakefulness, and prayer. Advent, he said, calls us to “stay awake,” to be vigilant, “looking outside ourselves, enlarging our minds and our hearts to be open to the needs of the people, of our brothers and sisters, and to the desire for a new world.”
Closely tied to vigilance is the idea of prayer. “It’s a matter of standing up and praying, turning our thoughts and our hearts to Jesus who is about to come,” the Pope explained. “We stand up when we’re expecting someone.” He warned that if we see Christmas only through the lens of consumerism, as a “worldly celebration,” then “Jesus will pass us by, and we will not find Him.” Let us await Jesus, Pope Francis said, “and let us desire to await Him in prayer.”
In the Old Testament reading for Sunday, Jeremiah speaks harshly to his people, who are at risk of losing their identity. “We Christians, too,” the Pope said, “risk becoming worldly and losing our identity, indeed, of ‘paganizing’ the Christian style.” And so, he concluded, we stand in need of the Word of God, which proclaims “Behold, the days are coming, says the LORD, when I will fulfill the promise I made… I will raise up for David a just shoot; He shall do what is right and just in the land” And that just shoot, the Pope said, “is Jesus, it is Jesus who comes whom we await.”
ENDS
Source: Vatican News
