The Vigil of Advent

In just a few short minutes the Season of Advent will be upon us. Lent is my favorite season of the Church year but for the past few years Advent has been very close upon it's heels. I'm beginning to appreciate this time of year more. It truly is a time of quiet preperation and watchfulness. Instead of waiting for our Lord's Passion and Death and then His Resurrection we are waiting for the Newborn Baby to arrive.

I am feeling in my soul this year the need for simplicty. Simplicity in my heart and soul and mind. There's too much "stuff" going on "inside". I need to work a bit more on cleaning it out so that on Christmas I will be able to say that there is "room at the inn" of my heart.

I am being led to walk this Advent close beside our Blessed Mother. To follow Her footsteps and to watch and learn from Her actions. Which were silent. Calmness. Gentleness. Faithfully. Trustfully. All things that I am struggling mightly with these past few weeks.

And while tonight is the Vigil of Advent I feel like my Vigil for Advent has been happening over the course of the past month. I am in the final stages of my renewal of St. Louis de Montfort's Preparation for Total Consecration. In fact tonight began the third part. The part themed "Knowledge of Jesus Christ."

Part of St. Louis' introduction to this part reads "His interior life, namely, the virtues and the acts of His Sacred Heart; His association with Mary in the mysteries of the Annunciation and Incarnation; during His infancy and hidden life; at the feast of Cana and on Calvary..."

I believe that is where we will find knowledge of Jesus Christ. In His hiddenness for the 30 years from His birth until the Wedding at Cana. In silence. I pray that these next six days before my renewal Consecration that I can find some of that silence in my soul. That somehow our Lady can help me retreat from the world while still living in it. So that I am able to grow closer to Her and Her Son in a deeper way this week as well as all of Advent. So that on the Feast of the Nativity I will have prepared well for His coming and be able to welcome Him into my heart that will be full of Joy and Peace in a way that only He can fill it with.