Happy New Year! The First Sunday of Advent brings us the beginning of a new Liturgical Year. And part of the process of beginning a new Liturgical Year is a reflection on time: the relationship between the past, the present, and the future.
All Catholic liturgy, every moment of our worship, is never about “the static time of repeated patterns that never change from year to year.” What we celebrate centrally in our worship are events of history, most importantly the life, death, and Resurrection of Jesus the Lord, but they are events that we claim for the present. The Risen Lord is powerfully present in every present moment.
So, starting a new Year, we need to remember that the saving events of Christ’s life, death and Resurrection, have to be made present in daily living, as well as our liturgy. Pope Francis has said that “It is in the changing circumstances of new life and new history that the mystery of salvation will unfold.”
In this new Liturgical Year, we will all change, both individually and as community. We pray on this First Sunday of Advent that the change will be for the better, that we will come to realize more and more Christ’s presence among us and our bonds with each other. Let us never let our individual prayer or collective worship be turned merely toward the past – but toward a living presence in the here and now and a real future, which the Lord Himself has promised.
