One cold December night, Bishop Jean Marie Latour spotted an elderly woman crouched in the doorway of his church. She was crying: for the first time in nineteen years, she had managed to escape her captors to visit the church, only to find it locked. The bishop opened the doors for her, and the two prayed together before the statue of Our Lady.

Never had it been permitted him to behold such deep experience of the holy joy of religion as on that pale December night. He was able to feel, kneeling beside her, the preciousness of the things of the altar to her who was without possessions; the tapers, the image of the Virgin, the figures of the saints, the Cross that took away indignity from suffering and made pain and poverty a means of fellowship with Christ. Kneeling beside the much enduring bond-woman, he experienced those holy mysteries as he had done in his young manhood. He seemed able to feel all it meant to her to know that there was a Kind Woman in Heaven, though there were such cruel ones on earth. Old people, who have felt blows and toil and known the world’s hard hand, need, even more than children do, a woman’s tenderness. Only a Woman, divine, could know all that a woman can suffer. Not often, indeed, had Jean Marie Latour come so near to the Fountain of all Pity as in the Lady Chapel that night; the pity that no man born of woman could ever utterly cut himself off from; that was for the murderer on the scaffold, as it was for the dying soldier or the martyr on the rack. The beautiful concept of Mary pierced the priest’s heart like a sword.

— Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather

The story may be fictional, but the message is true, and has been experienced by countless many. “The Blessed Virgin is the comforter of the afflicted,” writes Our Cardinal. “We all know how special a mother’s consolation is, and we are allowed to call Mary our Mother from the time that our Lord from the Cross established the relation of mother and son between her and St John.”

Even Christ benefitted from the his Mother’s consolation. As he hung on the cross, he knew that she was the one person who had no part in his being there. His Mother alone was in no way responsible through her own actions for his suffering, thanks to the extraordinary gift of God’s grace that she received from the very first moment of her existence. Mary’s Immaculate Conception enabled her to comfort her Son even in his agony, in a way that no other human being ever could. And she is for us still that “Kind Woman in Heaven”, a fountain of pity, and a consolation to all of us in this vale of tears.

Advent, as we well know, is a season of waiting and anticipation, when the Church invites us to reflect on the mystery of our Lord’s coming — past, present and future. In the writings of St John Henry Newman, our Cardinal, we find some profound insights as to how we are to live this season of anticipation. St John Henry reminds us of the importance of interior preparation. In one of his sermons, he writes: “We are not simply to believe, but to watch; not simply to love, but to watch; not simply to obey, but to watch.” This watchfulness is at the heart of Advent — and it is not a merely passive waiting, but an active, intentional readiness for the coming of the Lord. Newman’s words are a challenge to go beyond the surface, to put away distractions and to prepare our hearts to receive the Lord with purity and devotion. Advent, for our cardinal, is meant to be understood as a call to self-awareness — not to drift through life without a clear sense of purpose, for the Christian has a definite work to do and an important goal in mind. “Respice finem!”

Newman’s life and theology is deeply infused with hope, a truly Advent virtue, which looks forward to the end and fulfilment of things. “Faith tells us of things we do not see, but hope tells us of things that are to come.” Advent is marked by this hopeful longing, not just for the celebration of the Nativity of our Lord at Christmas, but also of the future, when “He shall come again in glory, to judge both the living and the dead.” For Newman, hope is not some wishful thinking: it is rooted in trust in God’s promises and a confident expectation that they will be fulfilled. The Cardinal, clung on to this virtue during the course of his long life; especially during the many trials and difficulties he faced, which he endured in faith with great hope, trusting always that God “knows what he is about.”

At the heart of Advent is the mystery of the Incarnation, the Word becoming flesh and living among us. Our Cardinal contemplated this profound mystery of God’s love for his world, seeing it, the generosity of God towards us, and his humility in becoming one like us. In one Christmas sermon, he reflects on the amazing fact of the Lord’s humility: “And with a wonderful condescension he came, not as before in power, but in weakness, in the form of a servant, in the likeness of that fallen creature whom he purposed to restore.” And in his sermon The Greatness and Littleness of Human Life: “He became as one of his own creatures, as one of ourselves, born of a woman, having flesh and blood, bones and nerves, like ours.” This truth should fill us with awe and gratitude, as much as it did the Church Fathers of the early centuries, as they struggled to present the Catholic Faith coherently, formulating the Creeds, so that Christians could express what they believed with a united voice and heart. The Incarnation continues today, because Jesus Christ is still Emmanuel, “God with us”, here and now, living among us in his Word and in the Sacrament of the Altar. Let us then foster the true Advent spirit, of watching and “waiting in Blessed Hope for the coming of our Saviour Jesus Christ”.

With everything that is going on in the world today you might think that the end is nigh. Every news report and weather forecast seems designed to make us all very frightened. But every age has had its wars and crises, and there have always been those who have claimed special knowledge about the end of the world or some coming disaster: mankind has always lived in the shadow of some uncertainty about what the future holds.

As we end one liturgical year and begin Advent once more, the Church has us turn our hearts and minds to the end-times. The Lord made a considerable number of predictions of the future in the Gospels, and many of them involve death and disaster. They fall roughly into two: predictions about the destruction of the Temple and Jerusalem, and predictions concerning the end of the world. Jerusalem and the temple were indeed to be destroyed in AD 70 by the Romans under Trajan, and not one stone stood upon another. Often, however, in the Gospels we find predictions of the end of Jerusalem and the Temple mixed up with predictions about the end of the world. Our Lord says that there will be many earthquakes, plagues, famines, wars: for these will inevitably occur. Almost every age of the world has experienced its ample share of these things. But maybe that’s exactly the point. The end of the world is always nigh.

Because it is not the end of this physical world — the earth, and all it contains — that should concern us, but our own end. From the standpoint of our own death, what will we regard as being the most important in our lives? Probably not our careers, or politics, or economics, or our bank accounts, or our carbon footprints, but probably our families, those we have loved, and how we have lived during the time given to us. And of course our own end will be in judgement, for we will have to render an account to our Creator. And that judgment will come down to the question — which we must be constantly asking ourselves — whether God and our neighbour have been the principal concerns of our life. Scripture constantly emphasises these questions. Remember Our Lord’s summary of the Law: You shall love the Lord your God, and your neighbour as yourself. Heaven and Earth will pass away, but his words shall not pass away.

Our consolation is, of course, that while war, disaster and death are inevitable, hell is not. We have the strength and consolation — and great hope — of our faith, with all the assistance that our faith gives us, to avoid the fate worse than war, disaster and death. As Christians we need to accept that assistance and use it regularly — the Mass and Holy Communion obviously, but also Confession, and prayer and fasting and penance and good works. That is how we ensure that God and our neighbour are our principal concerns, and our primary anxieties. If we are trying to live a good life, with the help of God’s grace, trying to help others and love others, and put right those things that are wrong in us and in the world, then we have no need to fear our own apocalypses, and the judgment of the one who loves us more than we could ever deserve. He is the one, as St Paul says, who does more for us than we can ask or even imagine. Or in his own words, the one who came not to condemn the world, but so that through him the world — and that means you and I — might be saved.

We are not all of us going to be a “morning person”. Some people do seem to be able to jump out of bed bright and cheery and full of beans; I remember being told that it was because of such people that breakfast was eaten in silence in religious houses. The fact is that for some of us it takes us rather longer to begin the day and start functioning as a human being. And yet there is something so glorious about the morning, with its silence and its sunrise. Even during those awful times when waking from sleep comes with dread — even then there is a great promise which dawns with the rising sun, when as the darkness gives way so gently and so quietly to light, God says to us all again, “Behold, I am making all things new.”

And for the Church her day begins anew too. By the time this reflection goes out to the world from the gates of 25 Woodstock Road, the Mystical Body of Christ has been long awake and doing Her Master’s work. In this city the religious brothers and sisters of various flavours have already taken our prayers and praise, and that of the whole Church, and sung them in the offices of Matins and Lauds. The houses of God will have opened their doors and gates so all who pass near can “come and see” and begin the day with God. In our own Oratory church the Fathers and Brothers will have made their meditation as Fr Manni tells us:

Each of the brethren, as best he can, pours out his soul to God, and with silent lips but clamorous heart pleads the cause of his salvation with God, with all the piety of a devout soul, by means of prayer, supplication, asking for the bestowal of gifts and praising the bounty of the divine spirit with all his heart.

Meanwhile souls in need of the mercy of God have been into the confessional and out again, having sought the mercy of God and found it again. The altar is set and Christ comes down to this Bethlehem, this House of Bread, to feed his people once more with food for the journey — with his grace and his charity — that this day, which could be the last for any of us, may be lived with him in whom all find life. 

Whatever or whomsoever the Lord may send us this day, we begin with him anew, offering to him all that is and has been and ever shall be, begging him the grace that this day, please God this day, his brilliant light may dawn upon us, upon those whose names he has written on our hearts, and on all his children, that all might walk in his grace. It is only his light, his dawn, that can bid the clouds and pangs of dread or fear to depart and give way at last to his day, his morning both excellent and fair.

Monsignor Benson writes so wonderfully of the Church’s ceaseless action in the service of her Lord:

For I see through her eyes, the Eyes of God to shine, and through her lips I hear his words. In each of her hands as she raises them to bless, I see the wounds that dripped on Calvary, and her feet upon her Altar stairs are signed with the same marks as those which the Magdalene kissed. As she comforts me in the confessional I hear the voice that bade the sinner go and sin no more; and as she rebukes or pierces me with blame I shrink aside trembling with those who went out one by one, beginning with the eldest, till Jesus and the penitent were left alone. As she cries her invitation through the world I hear the same ringing claim as that which called, “Come unto me and find rest to your souls”; as she drives those who profess to serve her from her service I see the same flame of wrath that scourged the changers of money from the temple courts.

As I watch her in the midst of her people, applauded by the mob shouting always for the rising sun, I see the palm branches about her head, and the City and Kingdom of God, it would seem, scarcely a stone’s throw away, yet across the valley of the Kedron and the garden of Gethsemane; and as I watch her pelted with mud, spurned, spat at and disgraced, I read in her eyes the message that we should weep not for her but for ourselves and for our children, since she is immortal and we but mortal after all. As I look on her white body, dead and drained of blood, I smell once more the odour of the ointments and the trampled grass of that garden near to the place where he was crucified, and hear the tramp of the soldiers who came to seal the stone and set the watch. And, at last, as I see her moving once more in the dawn light of each new day, or in the revelation of evening, as the sun of this or that dynasty rises and sets, I understand that he who was dead has come forth once more with healing in his wings, to comfort those that mourn and to bind up the broken-hearted; and that his coming is not with observation, but in the depth of night as his enemies slept and his lovers woke for sorrow. Yet even as I see this I understand that Easter is but Bethlehem once again; that the cycle runs round again to its beginning and that the conflict is all to fight again; for they will not be persuaded, though One rises daily from the dead.”

(From ‘Christ in the Church’)

It is morning. We begin again. Behold, he is making all things new.