Today, we begin a new liturgical calendar with the season of Advent. From the Latin “ad-venire” or “to come” is the season encompassing the four Sundays (and weekdays) leading up to the celebration of Christmas. It is an opportune time to direct our hearts and minds to the coming of Christ.

St. Bernard of Clairvaux writes that “the coming of the Lord is threefold… The first coming (birth at Bethlehem) was in flesh and weakness, the middle coming (everyday through the Sacraments) is in spirit and power, and the final coming (Parousia) will be in glory and majesty.” He continues with the importance of Jesus’ everyday coming to us in the present moment: “This middle coming is like a road that leads from the first coming to the last. At the first, Christ was our redemption; at the last, he will become manifest as our life; but in the middle way, he is our rest and our consolation.”

I invite you to understand better this three-fold coming of Christ through our Advent Series this year.

How do we recognize his coming into our lives? St. Paul gives us a clear advice: “You know the time; it is the hour now for you to wake from sleep.” To wake from sleep is taken not literally but figuratively. It means Intentionally getting out of the darkness of sins. Hence, he follows his advice with a very strong urging: “let us conduct ourselves properly as in the day, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in promiscuity and lust, not in rivalry and jealousy.”

Further, sleep is also associated with indifference. When one is asleep, he/she becomes unaware of what is happening around. Jesus cites the indifference of people during Noah’s time. “… they were eating and drinking and giving in marriage, up to the day that Noah entered the ark. They did not know…” While there was nothing wrong with these human activities, they were mistaken in their indifference to the disaster that was to come. They missed the ark because they were buried “asleep” in the busy-ness of their own lives.

We do not want you to miss out on what our “ark”, that is, our beautiful parish, wants to offer you. We know you want to be active participants in our programs and events but forgetfulness can come into the picture. The many things you need to accomplish everyday preoccupy you, so you forget. You want to come but you end up missing out. Only to remember afterwards, sadly.

Hence, we are launching Flocknote this weekend. It is an email and text messaging tool created for churches, ministries and organizations. St. Paul will be using it to message and remind you of urgent and important information. We can alert you of relevant news such as schedule of holy days of obligation or cancellation of events due to severe weather. In it also, there are different groups that you can be a part of, so you only get information that you are interested in.

Flocknote will be used only as an information dissemination tool. There will be no commercial advertisements or discussions of any type. You will also not receive any inbox “spam” as a result. Please check the information on page 7 and subscribe.