First Sunday of Advent (Year C) - 1 December
1st December 2024
“Advent is here! What a marvellous time in which to renew your desire, your nostalgia, your real longing for Christ to come.” - St Josemaria Escriva
A reflection on today's readings by the Venerable Archbishop Fulton J Sheen:
"You live in a world in which the worldly wise say: ‘You do not know life; you have never lived.’ They assume you can know nothing except by experience – experience not only of good but of evil.
"It was with this kind of lie that Satan tempted our First Parents. He told them that the reason God forbade them to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil was because God did not want them to be wise as He was wise. Satan did not tell them that if they came to a knowledge of good and evil, it would be very different from God’s knowledge.
"God knows evil only abstractly, that is, by negation of His Goodness and Love. But man would know it concretely and experimentally, and thus would to some extent fall captive to the very evil which he experienced. God wanted our First Parents to know typhoid fever, for example, as a healthy doctor knows it; He did not want them to know it as the stricken patient knows it. And from that day of the Great Lie, down to this, no one is better because he knows evil through experience.
"Examine your own life. If you know evil by experience, are you wiser because of it? Have you not despised that very evil and are you not the more tragic for having experienced it? You may even have become mastered by the evil you experienced. How often the disillusioned say: ‘I wish I had never tasted liquor,’ or ‘I regret the day I stole my first dollar,’ and ‘I wish I had never known that person.’ How much wiser you would have been had you been ignorant.
"Over and over again, when you broke some law which you thought arbitrary and meaningless, you discovered the principle which dictated it. As a child, you could not understand why your parents forbade you to play with matches, but the burn convinced you of the truth of the law. So the world by violating God’s moral law is finding through war, strife, and misery the wisdom of the law. How it would now like to unlearn its false learning!
"Think not, then, that in order to ‘know life’ you must ‘experience evil.’ Is a doctor wiser because he is prostrate with disease? Do we know cleanliness by living in sewers? Do we know education by experiencing stupidity? Do we know peace by fighting? Do we know the joys of vision by being blinded? Do you become a better pianist by hitting the wrong keys? You do not need to get drunk to know what drunkenness is.
"Do not excuse yourself by saying ‘temptations are too strong’ or ‘good people do not know what temptation is.’ The good know more about the strength of temptation than those who fall. How do you know how strong the current of a river is? By swimming with the current or by swimming against it? How do you know how strong the enemy is in battle? By being captured or by conquering? How can you know the strength of a temptation unless you overcome it? Our Blessed Lord really understands the power of temptation better than anyone, because He overcame the temptations of Satan.
"The great fallacy of modern education is the assumption that the reason there is evil in the world is because there is ignorance, and that if we pour more facts in the minds of the young we will make them better. If this were true, we should be the most virtuous people in the history of the world, because we are the best educated.
"The facts, however, point the other way: Never before has there been so much education and never before so little coming to the knowledge of the truth. We forget that ignorance is better than error. Knowledge is not wisdom. Badness comes not from our ignorance of knowing, but from our perversity of doing.
"That is why in our Catholic schools we train and discipline the will as well as inform the intellect, because we know that character is in our choices, not in our knowing. All of us already know enough to be good, even before we start to school. What we have to learn is how to do better.
"Train your children and yourself, then, in the true wisdom which is the knowledge of God, and in the ignorance of the things that are evil. The unknown is the undesired; to be ignorant of wickedness is not to desire it. There are no joys like Innocence.
"You never know you were asleep until you wake up; and you never know the horror of sin until you get out of sin. Honestly, if you had the choice now either of learning more about the world or of unlearning the evil you know, would you not rather unlearn than learn? Would you not like to be right now, just as you came from the hands of God at the baptismal font, with no worldly wisdom yet gathered to your mind, so that like an empty chalice, you might spend your life filling it with the wine of His love? The world would call you ignorant, saying you knew nothing about life. Do not believe it – you would have Life! Therefore you would be one of the wisest persons in the world.
"There is so much error in the world today, there are such vast areas of experienced and lived evil, that it would be a blessing if some generous soul would endow a ‘University for Unlearning.’ Its purpose would be to do with error and evil exactly what doctors do with disease.
"Would you be surprised to know that Our Lord did actually institute such a University of Unlearning, and to it all devout Catholics go about once a month? It is called the Confessional! You will not be given sheepskin when you walk out of that confessional, but you will feel like a lamb because Christ is your Shepherd. You will be amazed at how much you will learn by unlearning. It is easier for God to write on a blank page than on one covered with your scribblings."
(Seven Words of Jesus and Mary)
Hope Candle
The first candle of Advent symbolises Hope and is called the “Prophet’s Candle” as it represents the anticipation of the arrival of the Messiah over thousands of years, which was made clear by the prophets.
Prayer for the First Week of Advent
Heavenly Father, we anxiously await the coming of Your Son, our Saviour, Jesus Christ. We invite You into our homes and hearts, that during this period of purification and preparation, You fill us up with the power of the Holy Spirit. Strengthened in You, we say, Let it be done according to Thy will. Amen. 💐💖🙏