This is my favorite type of Advent, that ends with Christmas on a Sunday. Next year I will feel a little cheated that the fourth "week" of Advent only lasts two days; at least, since it will occur during a leap year, we'll miss out on that dreadful Christmas Eve on Sunday dynamic. At any rate, even though Christmas falls on the same calendar date, I have more time to get spiritually ready when the fourth week of Advent is longer. This year I needed it, as I've had so much going on emotionally that I didn't really start preparing in earnest until a week ago.
In today's Office of Readings, St. Leo the Great discusses the necessity of our being saved by one like us, using the ways God has appeared to his people throughout salvation history and the first Adam's effect on all humankind to prepare us for Christ's uniting of the divine and the human. I love how he seamlessly works his way toward the joyful difference that this wondrous truth makes in our lives today, as the same Holy Spirit who by whom the Divine nature took on human nature allows our human nature to take on the Divine. But he does a much better job in expounding on it than I do summarizing, so it's worth reading in it's entirety.
This week's readings will build to the climax of Christ's Incarnation and birth, and I love that we get all of them this year! Now I just need to make the time for them - though preferably not around the same time the monks of Gethsemani pray this hour daily!
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