Good Morning Digital Neighbors! Happy Tuesday ADD Irregulars, Friends, Refugees, Phamily, Triggeratti and Seekers of Civility and Sanity! In Cath-O-Land we are cursing into the season of Advent. While the rest of world is overdosing on Mariah Carey and overloaded Amazon carts, the liturgical year invites us to contemplate endings.

Endings are a funny thing, some are expected with great gladness and many dread with immense fear. Many appreciate the end of the work week, children anticipate the end of the school year and we celebrate retirements. Death, loss of health and moves away from the familiar and beloved are endings we anticipate with dread and hesitation.

The first two weeks of Advent the church invites us to contemplate the end of all things and the Great Homecoming, Final Judgment and a New Heaven & Earth. It is not all peaches and cream in the Christian world, judgment and its rendering will lead to Communion or self imposed exile. While we believe God renders the judgment, we have written our cause and plea as it were by our faith in Christ and the subsequent acts of life post belief.

No one goes before God with bragging rights. The correct steps upon meeting the Mysterium, the Divine, the Ultimate, I think is a threefold process and probably the last remnants of temporal change that we will experience. Genuine sorrow for sin, a recounting of the blessings in gratitude and the profession of love, however poorly lived for the Divine and for neighbor. At the center of it all the is the Christ, the Forgiver, the Giver and the embodiment of love of Divine and Neighbor. He does the heavy lifting, we try to live accordingly in that awareness. The life we have now is the boot-camp, dress rehearsal and school of discipleship all rolled up into one. If Christmas didn't remind me of why we believe He came into the world, then this time of Advent reflection would be beyond hope. And Advent is a season of joyful and hopeful expectation. Happy Tuesday to all of my Digital Neighbors!