In this conference, Fr. Keep highlights four great aspects of the spirit of Advent and suggests that they are also four elements of a healthy and deepening prayer-life.
First of all there is the thirst for God. How many Advent prayers and hymns and aspirations express this longing for the coming of God! So it is that if we want to deepen our prayer we must be aware of this thirst and increase it, a deep longing for God to come. Our desire for Him to come is reduced when we have other desires, desires for created things or passing realities. If we desire necessary and lawful things in order better to serve and love God, these things do not reduce our thirst for God, but any attachment that is out of order or out of proportion does weaken our longing for God; so Advent detachment is part of the path to an improvement in our interior prayer. What is getting in the way? Let us be rid of it.
If thirst for God is the first need in our interior life, the second need is that we incorporate that thirst in our prayer in such a way as to plead with God to come. We need to ask and plead and implore Him to come, just as the Church does in Advent. We should never tire of asking God to come to us more and more and more. This is a prayer our loving Father simply cannot resist if it is humble and trusting. Let us ask God to be with us even though He is with us already, for He can always become more and more present within our hearts. The more He comes the more our hearts expand.
The third aspect of our Advent devotion is expectation. We not only thirst for God and ask Him to come, but we are quite sure He will come. As with all prayer, if we do not expect it to be answered it will not be answered. We are quite sure that God will come at the end of time. Let us be equally sure that He comes to us whenever we sincerely pray to Him to do so. What is more, we may well be right to expect that in our prayer we shall one of these days have a special light or special sense of peace and light or an unusually intense awareness that God is here and loves us. The less we expect from God, the less we shall get. The more we confidently expect, the more we shall receive. Expectation: Let us not begin our prayer times with a sense that nothing ever happens and that we are not good at prayer. God might come at any moment, and He can change us in a flash if He so wills.
It is not much good thirsting for God, asking Him to come, and expecting Him, if we are looking the other way when He does come. It is not much good begging for Him to come in our interior prayer, whether it is of half an hour’s duration or some other period, if we then give way to distractions and slovenliness and are mentally elsewhere at the precise moment God offers us a special grace. . . We lose very many graces through looking the other way. We get too far away from recollection and are not responsive. God sometimes leaves us apparently on our own at prayer, and we find it hard going. Then during the day, when we are doing His will in our ordinary round of duties, He may suddenly give us a flash of interior light or joy or insight or realization. . .
We must be firmly convinced that God is intensely longing for us to live with our hearts at rest in Him. We may be tempted to think that the reason why we do not live like that is because the world is in such a state that we feel no peace, or our companions are so unsatisfactory that they do not really encourage us and help us to be virtuous; or we may think that because of our own personal failings, weaknesses, and interior difficulties we are not in an environment suitable for fostering close union with God. . . But alas, there is no perfect community; there is no perfect environment; . . . We are sinners living among sinners, and we cannot escape from this condition. God invites us to rest our hearts in Him not by being Saints or living among Saints but by trying to become Saints, and in the mean time living in contrite peace with Him, resting in Him with unlimited trust in His loving mercy.
