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For many of us, our daily life consists of walking around, looking down at our phone, hoping the next thing we see will offer us a moment of happiness.
Often it is how we cope with our own situation and the suffering we may be enduring on the inside.
Advent can help us break from that cycle, put down our phone, and enter into the presence of God.
God wants to speak to you
Pope Benedict XVI reflected on a similar theme during a homily in 2009, stating how the world can “monopolize” our attention:
In our daily lives we all experience having little time for the Lord and also little time for ourselves. We end by being absorbed in “doing“. Is it not true that activities often absorb us and that society with its multiple interests monopolizes our attention? Is it not true that we devote a lot of time to entertainment and to various kinds of amusement? At times we get carried away.
Advent is the perfect opportunity to evaluate our own screen time and to compare it to the time we are open to God’s presence.
The good news is that God is already knocking at our door, but we need to open it to him and stop what we are doing, as Pope Benedict XVI explains:
The meaning of the expression “advent” therefore includes that of visitatio, which simply and specifically means “visit”; in this case it is a question of a visit from God: he enters my life and wishes to speak to me…Advent, this powerful liturgical season that we are beginning, invites us to pause in silence to understand a presence. It is an invitation to understand that the individual events of the day are hints that God is giving us, signs of the attention he has for each one of us.
God wants to “visit” us and to speak to our hearts. However, we need to be listening to him and that requires focused attention, without any distractions to prevent the ears of our heart from hearing his voice.
And today we celebrate...