A Message from Fr. Jay
Dear Friends,
When I was 6 years old, looking at my mother’s pregnant belly, I nagged her almost every day when my baby brother would arrive. Somehow, I wanted a baby brother because I didn’t want to pay dowry for a baby sister! (Those days, and even today, scanning the gender of the baby in the womb is against the law where I come from in India. It is because the practice of female infanticide was reported among some communities. The root cause for female infanticide was the dowry system).
I can tell you that I couldn’t wait for the new baby be born….I can still remember the day when my mother was taken to the hospital in a Cycle Rickshaw (a three-wheeler-pulled by a man) on the eve of my brother’s birth. I didn’t want to sleep that night. It was really an anxious time waiting with such expectation.
The Advent Season is a time of expectation, not only for celebrating the birthday of Jesus but also for His Second Coming – of which no one knows the time of its arrival. We are left with expectation. God wants us to realize that our expectation should lead to ‘Hope’. Anxiety brings forth despair. As Christians, we realize that we are persons of ‘Hope’. All the weeks in the advent season will lead us to see the real “Light of the world” both in Word and Sacrifice!
Please make use of several occasions and events offered on the calendar and in the bulletin during this season. It will renew your “Hope” for keeping yourselves spiritually fit for His Second Coming, as well as the feast of the Nativity!
God Bless,
Fr. Jay Raju
- Reading 1: Isaiah 2:1-5
- Reading 2: Romans 13: 11-14
- Gospel: Mathew 24: 37-44
