Our Lady knows all about prep time for Christmas, the advent of the Lord. It’s a time when, in the northern hemisphere, it’s always getting darker, when things are dying, when, as one priest said in a difficult moment: all the lights are going out. It’s always the darkest before the Dawn from on High comes among us.
In these dark, cold days, all goes to seed. But that brings the promise of new life.
Even that which is going through its most difficult manifests a certain beauty, enthralling, having one end up in amazement, as always, before our Creator.
No matter where you look, life is changed, not ended. Heck, even the moss, or whatever this is, goes through it’s cycle…
The variety is spectacular…
The glory fades…
And yet, if you know what to look for, if you have a bit of awe before our Heavenly Father, you can find great beauty everywhere and with everything.
Just imagine. Our Lady had eyes that could see beauty even in us, if only we would do the will of God, which is precisely the intention of her prayers for us. Then, if we, cut down by the ravages of original sin, must also die, yet we know that there is life eternal on the way. We thank the Immaculate Conception for her prayers for us.
As the feast of the Immaculate Conception gets nearer, I’m hoping to put up a nine hour novena on the day itself. Yikes!
Accompany me, Father George David Byers, S.S.L., S.T.D., as I begin life as a Catholic Priest-Hermit by choice. Holy Souls Hermitage is dedicated to the sanctification of my fellow priests, bishops, deacons & seminarians going through the purgatory of this life or the next. Prayer and sacrifice go up, of course, for both Benedict XVI and the next Successor of Saint Peter. 
Dear Father Byers,
Thank you again for your wonderful photographs and inspiring words. I always get a smile out of the pictures of Laudie!
On someone’s blog the other day, I came across this quote from Origen:
“…You must keep in mind that you cannot hear ‘the winter is past’ any other way than by entering the contest of this present winter with all your strength and might and main. And after the winter is past, and the rain is over and gone, the flowers will appear that are planted in the house of the Lord and flourish in the courts of our God.”
May you have a blessed Advent!
Jane