Read Be Vigilant: Daily Meditations for Advent for Free Online

people you know. Not the better than good people that you know. Not one!
    God wants everyone to be saved.
    Fostering a longing for the coming of Christ can only happen if we believe that it is for our good.
    Fulton Sheen used to portray the image of Satan and Christ speaking to a soul both before the person committed a sin and afterwards. Before,  Sheen said, Christ seemed like the obstacle to the sinner, Satan the friend. "God doesn't want you to enjoy yourself, etc" But after sin the real identity of Satan as the accuser takes shape, "Now you've done it! God could never love you after what you've done! You might as well go on doing it!" But Christ appears as a savior, "Come back, I forgive you!"

Wednesday of the Second Week of Advent
    Rest, that is what the Lord promises today to those who come to Him. If you work and you find yourself overburdened, come to Him and He will give you rest.
    This is kind of the opposite of all the other sayings that we often think of when we think of following Jesus. Most of them emphasize the cross and the difficulty. We think of it as something hard and it would be if it weren't for Jesus.
    The focus must always be on Him first. Come to Him and He will give you rest.
    I regularly see the difference in my life between the times that I spend quality time in prayer and those times that I do not. Everything seems more burdensome without prayer. Prayer--my time with Christ, puts everything in perspective, and indeed lightens my perceived place in the world.
    So today is an invitation, like those "rest area" signs that happen every forty or so miles on an interstate:  if you seek a light "yoke" and an easier "burden" follow the signs and come to the Lord.

Thursday of the Second Week of Advent
    When I hear the Gospel reading for today, I'm stopped in my tracks by the phrase "the kingdom of heaven has been subjected to violence and the violent are taking it by storm" and necessarily I've had to spend some time canvassing the great minds of the church to figure out just exactly what Jesus meant by this.
    Well, it turns out that the Greek word that is translated "violence" above is probably best rendered "forceful" but that doesn't change the overall passage that much, yet it does give us some indication of what is meant by violence. The early Fathers of the Church felt that the passage was best understood by thinking about who was entering the kingdom of heaven--sinners, namely people who did not belong there. They were intruders, outsiders who had been let in through the violence of the cross.
    Taking this a step further, if our sins are really what nailed Jesus to a cross then we see that the violence we have done to the Son of God in some way has been our ticket to the kingdom of heaven.
    It is only those however, who are desperate to enter who get in. One imagines the crowds that surrounded Jesus and John the Baptist (a modern example might be Pope John Paul and the crowds that surround his visits). Only a desperate person would get close enough to touch Our Lord.
    So it is today. Are we desperate in our desire to enter the kingdom of heaven or is it somewhere way down the list of things to do today?

Friday of the Second Week of Advent
    The gospel today confronts us with our own response to Jesus' call. The early Church Fathers saw this as an exasperated statement of Our Lord bemoaning the unbelief of the people no matter who the messenger. John the Baptist came leading an ascetical life and the people thought him possessed. Our Lord comes mixing with people, eating and drinking with them and they call him a glutton and drunkard. As one church father puts it, "The whole of this speech is a reproach of unbelief, and arises out of the foregoing complaint; that the stiff-necked people had not learned by two different modes of teaching".
    What about us? Are we stiff-necked when it comes to answering His call?  How do we respond to the "pipes" that are played for us...do we dance? How do we