Advent is a penitential season – we wear purple vestments, and the Gloria is omitted from Mass. Our churches are more stark and simple. We are encouraged to do penance, to go to confession, to prepare our hearts and lives for the coming of Christ at Christmas, but also – if not more so – at the end of our lives and at the End of Time. At yet it is not Lent, we still say the Alleluia, and our penance and preparation is hopeful, expectant. It is more prayerful. The Kingdom of God is near. 

In a sense, we ought not to be too upset about snowmen on Royal Mail stamps, Christmas parties and carol services, and All I want for Christmas playing in shopping centres from the first day of December. Somewhere is all of it is a deep yearning in people for meaning and connection, a desire for joy and relationship – ultimately, a desire for God. And if there is any meaning in in Our Lord’s instruction to stay awake, to be alert, that meaning comes from the promise that the Kingdom of God is near. 

We shouldn’t interpret our Lord’s command to be alert, stay awake, as awful warnings. We shouldn’t lapse into fear and foreboding. Instead, we should look for the signs that God’s kingdom is very near, signs of promise and hope, signs of new life in the midst of our troubled world. Advent is a time when we should look for such signs, cultivate and nurture the signs we discover, and be ourselves signs of the coming of God’s kingdom to the world around us, and therefore signs of hope.

And we can see such signs in the joy and pleasure of friends and family gathered together. In the joy and pleasure of Christmas parties. In the presents we might give, in the good works we can do in our city and our parish for the homeless or the lonely or those in hospital. We can see such signs in Advent candles and calendars, and Christmas cards, and Christmas lights, and the awful music, symbolising the hope and love of the season.

Stay awake! Be alert! In all of our preparations, our shopping, cooking, decorating, the hustle and bustle of the season, how are we paying attention to the nearness of God’s kingdom in ourselves, in our souls? It’s easy to allow the season and our day-to-day responsibilities of work and family to fill up our lives so the deep yearnings of our hearts, the desires of our souls to welcome Christ’s coming are left unmet, unnoticed. Be alert, stay awake! As people of hope, who are prepared to meet the Son of Man when he comes, we must nurture those shoots, that new growth, so that the Kingdom of God and the coming of his Son may blossom forth in our hearts; and this season of Advent might be a season of hope and love and transformation for all of us.

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This month began with All Saints, when we pray to our friends in Heaven, those known and unknown. Then the following day we mark All Souls, when we pray for those who have gone before us and, beautifully and comfortingly, we are reminded that our love for them survives even death and our prayers still help them. Friendship is the cornerstone of our Christian life; our daily conversion, our daily turning to our Friend so that in becoming more like Him that love may overflow from our hearts into our encounters with others. The Church, we might say, was founded on friendship: that of Our Lord for His Apostles and indeed for all whom He encountered. In the Oratory too, where we seek to imitate Christ by imitating St Philip, friendship is a hallmark of our vocation.

For St Philip, Cerrato writes, “[the notion of] ‘people’ did not exist, only ‘friends’ and everyone could become so”. The beginning and whole life of the Oratory consisted of St Philip making friends and drawing them into friendship with God and this remains the task of the Fathers today. Our Cardinal took as his motto “cor ad cor loquitur” (based on a similar phrase of the Oratorian bishop St Francis de Sales) and Newman himself led a life marked by friendships, by their loss and by their gain.

Our friendships are a great gift to us and enable us to experience in an especial way the love of Christ for us. Those whose names are written on our hearts, whom God has given a love for us, help us, rejoice with us, and offer us a support on the narrow way to Heaven — it is not so narrow that no-one can walk beside us.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote that “love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction,” and for Newman, “the love of our private friends is the only preparatory exercise for the love of all men.” There is a note of caution there. One thing St Philip always warned of was ‘particular friendships’. That phrase, which might sound rather Victorian to us, reminds us that friendships, whilst a special relationship, cannot be marked by exclusivity. We know (or hopefully can only imagine) the dangers of favouritism in families and workplaces; whereas for us as Christian we are called to love everyone from the depths of our heart and our task is to draw others into friendship. Father Spada of the Roman Oratory warned that “the closer anyone draws near to certain persons, the further, of necessity, he withdraws from others”. Our friends help us to overcome the walls we put up between ourselves and others and between ourselves and God; true friends do not help us suffocate love but rather to extend it.

We must then always pray to love our friends without exclusivity, without a sense of possession or a desire of control. In short, we must always pray to love them as Christ loved His friends. St Augustine wrote: “One does not lose those one loves if one loves them in Him whom one cannot lose”.

In November, indeed every day, we have the opportunity to pray for our friends who have gone before us and thus to love them still. Today (Wednesday) all our Masses are offered for those on our November List and after the 6pm Mass we will sing Vespers for the Dead. Come and pray for your friends.

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The weather forecasters tell us that this year is particularly unusual as the Autumn months have not had one frost when usually two or three are the norm. The spring bulbs might be a bit later as a result. The traditional picture is, of course, of Autumn being that season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, cooling down to the frosty winter snows and a white Christmas. It is, in any year, seldom the case.

There is a neat parallel with our lives in this. Often we think that things are mapped out neatly or are plainly predictable and in such a case we know how to respond. But if we are honest, it is rarely the case. Just as we should make the most of the fair weather while it is with us, so in our moral and spiritual life we must take the opportunity to grow in good habits whilst there is a fair wind behind us. Cultivating good habits of prayer, working on the virtues, asking for the graces we need now will help us weather the hard times when they come all the better. Everything is a grace, and most things are opportunities. The spring flowers might be a bit late but bloom they will.

The canticle of the three young men in the fiery furnace from the Book of Daniel, sung at Sunday Lauds, reminds us that even the frosts and cold give glory and praise to their maker. How well the frosts and cold of our life can give glory and praise to God largely depends on how well we have prepared for them. “The hour is late, but the time for doing good is not over yet” — or so St Philip taught his friends. Thank God for mild autumns and for the opportunities he grants us to grow in virtue. We just have to take them.

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On this day, in the year 324, Pope Saint Sylvester consecrated his new church on the site of the Lateran palace in Rome, given to him by the Emperor Constantine. The anniversary is celebrated liturgically each year, with the feast of the dedication of the Lateran basilica. It might well be one of those feast days we find it hard to get excited about. As inspiring as the church building itself may be to pray in (should we be lucky enough to find ourselves there in person), the consecration of a church catches our attention somewhat less than the characters of the holy men and women whose feast days we more commonly celebrate.

The full title of the church whose consecration we remember on this day is: ‘The Major Papal, Patriarchal and Roman Archbasilica Cathedral of the Most Holy Saviour and Saints John the Baptist and the Evangelist in Lateran, Mother and Head of All Churches in Rome and in the World.’ It receives that rather grand title because this church is the Pope’s cathedral. And this is the main reason we celebrate today’s anniversary. Just as we celebrate the consecration of our own cathedral in Birmingham to show our unity with the Archbishop and the local church, so we celebrate the consecration of the Pope’s cathedral in Rome to show our unity with the successor of St Peter and the church of Rome, and thus also with the universal Church.

As in all cathedrals, one of the most important objects is the cathedra, the bishop’s (or in this case, the Pope’s) throne. It is a sign of his teaching authority. And this particular cathedra represents the Pope’s authority and responsibility to teach not just his own diocese of Rome, but the Church all over the world.

There are some other slightly more unique objects in the Lateran that say something about our Catholic faith. Above the altar are housed the heads of St Peter and St Paul. They are there as a witness. They proclaim that this is how the faith reached this city of Rome, from which it spread to the whole world. It was the work of those men, a former fisherman and a former pharisee, that brought the Gospel preached by Christ to the capital of the ancient empire. These are not the heads of mythical heroes, but of historical figures, who introduced the world to Christ the Saviour.

Slightly more obscure is another relic of St Peter housed in the basilica. It’s not a part of his body, but a wooden table said to be the altar on which he and his successors celebrated Mass. 

Although later on blessed Sylvester decreed that thenceforward all altars should be built of stone; yet the altar of the Lateran Basilica was of wood. This however is not surprising. For, from the time of St Peter down to Sylvester, persecution prevented the Pontiffs from having any fixed abode; so that they offered the holy Sacrifice either in crypts of cemeteries, or in the houses of the faithful, as necessity compelled them, upon the said wooden altar, which was hollow like a chest. When peace was granted to the Church, Sylvester placed this altar in the first church, the Lateran; and in honour of the Prince of the Apostles, who is said to have offered the holy Sacrifice upon it, and of the other Pontiffs who had used it up to that time, he decreed that no one should celebrate Mass upon it except the Roman Pontiff.

(From the Divine Office for today’s feast)

There is very little modern information available about St Peter’s altar. Perhaps people are embarrassed to talk about it in case it turns out that it isn’t really that old. Although, St Peter would have said Mass, and it is not so unlikely that the church in Rome might have preserved and continued to use the table on which he did so. Whether truly historic or merely symbolic, the Lateran altar is a reminder that St Peter was above all a priest. This reminds us that it is, in the first place, through the continuous celebration of the Mass that the Church has always made Christ present to the world and continues to make him present today.

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