Advent Quotes — Mother Theresa: keeping our lamps burning

Another gem from Pat Dague’s blog Transfigurations, originally posted back in October.

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Don’t think that love, to be true, has to be extraordinary. What is necessary is to continue to love. How does a lamp burn, if it is not by the continuous feeding of little drops of oil? When there is no oil, there is no light and the bridegroom will say: “I do not know you”. Dear friends, what are our drops of oil in our lamps? They are the small things from every day life: the joy, the generosity, the little good things, the humility and the patience. A simple thought for someone else. Our way to be silent, to listen, to forgive, to speak and to act. That are the real drops of oil that make our lamps burn vividly our whole life. Don’t look for Jesus far away, He is not there. He is in you, take care of your lamp and you will see Him.”

– Mother Teresa

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Advent Quotes: Joseph Bottum

What Advent is, really, is a discipline: a way of forming anticipation and channeling it toward its goal. There’s a flicker of rose on the third Sunday—Gaudete!, that day’s Mass begins: Rejoice!—but then it’s back to the dark purple that is the mark of the season in liturgical churches. And what those somber vestments symbolize is the deeply penitential design of Advent. Nothing we can do earns us the gift of Christmas, any more than Lent earns us Easter. But a season of contrition and sacrifice prepares us to understand and feel something about just how great the gift is when at last the day itself arrives.

– Joseph Bottum, First Things

Read the whole EXCELLENT essay here

Advent Quotes — Frederick Buechner: “First Sunday of Advent”

First Sunday of Advent

“The house lights go off and the footlights come on. Even the chattiest stop chattering as they wait in darkness for the curtain to rise. In the orchestra pit, the violin bows are poised. The conductor has raised his baton. In the silence of a midwinter dusk, there is far off in the deeps of it somewhere a sound so faint that for all you can tell it may be only the sound of the silence itself. You hold your breath to listen. You walk up the steps to the front door. The empty windows at either side of it tell you nothing, or almost nothing. For a second you catch a whiff of some fragrance that reminds you of a place you’ve never been and a time you have no words for. You are aware of the beating of your heart…The extraordinary thing that is about to happen is matched only by the extraordinary moment just before it happens. Advent is the name of that moment.”

— Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark, pp. 2,3

(We first posted this on Dec. 4th, 2006 with a hat tip to the “Go to Bethlehem blog” where were first saw it linked.  Image:  Finnish National Orchestra)

Index of ALL Advent entries from 2004 – 2006

Ok all you Advent-o-philes! Dig in! We’ve done it! We’ve gone back through the archives and cached versions of the old Lent & Beyond website, and we’ve put together a listing (with hopefully working links to archived versions of each post) of ALL of our Advent entries at Lent & Beyond in 2004, 2005, and 2006. (In 2007 due to the hacker problems at our old blog we posted very little Advent stuff, and all that’s already here on this version of the blog, just dig back through the Advent Category.)

There are about 200 blog entries in these 3 Advent indexes. Enjoy!

Index to 2004 Advent posts
Index to 2005 Advent posts
Index to 2006 Advent posts

(Some of these entries will be making a reappearance here this year as part of our Advent Favorites series…, but we wanted to make the old archived links available now to everyone who might be looking for Advent devotional material or Advent resources.)

Note: the updated version of our Advent Resources Compilation is now here on this blog. I’ve not included the archived version in the 2005 or 2006 index.

An Index of all of our 2006 Advent Posts (from our old blog)

Note, all of these links should be clickable. They point to the archived versions of posts at our old site. If you have problems reading something, give a shout in the comments. We have all of these posts saved in Word Format, so could repost something or forward it by e-mail as needed.

Some of these will be reposted on this blog coming days and weeks as part of our “Advent Favorites” series. The entries listed below are in chronological order as we posted them last year.

Preparing for Advent — Peter Toon: Stir up our wills — Today!

Zechariah 9:9-10

Favorite Advent Devotional Posts from 2004 – 2005

Preparing for Advent

Index of 2005 Advent Posts (from our old site)

Our most significant Advent posts from 2005 (in chronological order as we posted them). Note, I’ve excluded posts with links to the daily Scripture readings unless there was commentary about the passages included. All of these links should be clickable and take you to archived versions of our old Advent entries. Leave a comment if you have trouble.

From Thanksgiving to Advent…

That Your name may be made holy in us

Advent 1

Henri Nouwen — An Advent Prayer

A table with Advent Readings for Year 2

Online Advent Resources: Advent Calendars

Welcome to Lent & Beyond’s Advent Devotional Series

Of the Father’s Love Begotten

Lighting the Advent Wreath

An Index of all our Advent posts from 2004 (from our old site)

All of the links below should take you to readable copies of the archive of our old blog. The entries are in chronological order as posted in 2004. If you have problems with any link, please leave a comment.

A meditation on the Advent Collect — Peter Toon

Leander Harding: Advent and Hope

Lord, Revive Us! (Charles Spurgeon)

Advent thoughts from Kendall Harmon

I Am No Longer My Own (St. Catherine of Genoa)

The Servant King (Graham Kendrick)

I Am Not Worthy… (St. John Chrysostom)