Next week the Season of Advent begins, the short four-week period during which we prepare for the liturgical Celebration of the Birth of Jesus.
It is a good time to rededicate ourselves to prayer, sacraments, the practice of virtue and the corporal and spiritual works of mercy.
For most of us, however, the spiritual practices of the liturgical Season of Advent are always in great competition with the many pressures, pulls and tugs of the holiday season.
This is when we would do well to heed the sound spiritual advice of Meister Eckhart and St. Francis de Sales.
Francis advises in his Introduction to the Devout Life,
“let us try sincerely, humbly, and devoutly to acquire those little virtues whose conquest our Savior has set forth as the end of our care and labor. Such are patience, meekness, self-mortification, humility, obedience, poverty, chastity, tenderness toward our neighbors, bearing with their imperfections, diligence and holy fervor” (Part 3, chapter 2).
Three hundred years before Francis, Meister Eckhart gave very similar advice: “…In doing good, it does not matter if I apply it to small or great things, because there is no difference between a drop and the sea.”
Busy people, stressed people, harried people --which most of us are during the holidays-- may want to do many and great things in order to better themselves spiritually but they must often learn to be content doing few and little things with “great love,” as Francis writes elsewhere.
With the pandemic still with us in so many ways, these weeks of Advent will be especially stressful. Daily life under these circumstances will provide you and me with countless opportunities to be patient, gentle and forgiving; tender toward those (who are often nearest to us) whose imperfections and shortcomings can be particularly irksome at a time of great stress and fatigue.
In the busyness of the coming weeks, let us be content with attending to the “drops” of which Meister Eckhart writes but with the “great love” that Francis urges.
God be Praised!
For the past month, we have had weekly postings on Facebook about each of the The Little Virtues, by St. Francis de Sales. To find out more, click here.
Gratefully,
V. Rev. Lewis S. Fiorelli, OSFS
Provincial
Wilmington-Philadelphia Province
This reflection originally appeared in DeSales Weekly, the e-newsletter of the Oblates of St. Francis de Sales.
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