A word about Advent

For the next few weeks, during the season of Advent, Pray-as-you-go is going to be a bit different from usual, and we thought you might like a word of explanation:

So far this year, each day of Pray-as-you-go has been a prayer session on its own, centred on that day's scripture, with no presumption that you prayed with Pray-as-you-go yesterday, or that you will be praying with Pray-as-you-go tomorrow.

This has its advantages - if you miss a day or two, or a week or two, or even longer, you can just pick up where you left off; and newcomers don't have the problem of there being some vital earlier sessions that they have missed.  But the disadvantage is that if every day is separate, you don't get the chance to go more deeply into a theme over several days, and build on the experience of previous days' prayer, so there's less of a sense of making progress, or of making a spiritual journey.

The season of Advent seems like a good opportunity to make that kind of journey, to dwell a bit longer on certain themes, to delve a bit deeper, and go on something of a prayer journey together towards the celebration of the birth of Jesus at Christmas.

In the First Week of Advent, the readings from the Prophet Isaiah focus on our desire for God and for good things, for salvation, freedom, peace… so we'll be taking the opportunity to spend the whole week looking at those desires in ourselves, culminating on Friday 8th December, the feast of the Immaculate Conception, in a longer-than-usual meditation taken straight from the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius.

In the Second Week of Advent, the readings from Isaiah continue, spelling out God's promise to humanity, to send us One who will bring salvation, and the good things we desire.  So we'll be spending the week looking at God's promise and how we understand it and respond to it.

In the Third Week of Advent (and there are only three full weeks in Advent this year) the Gospel readings begin to narrate the story of how this promise came to be fulfilled, in all the events leading up to the birth of Jesus.  For most of this third week, the format of Pray-as-you-go will be quite different, with a focus less on listening to and savouring the words of scripture, and more on imagining and savouring the scenes and the events that the scriptures describe.  So, instead of repeating the reading as we usually do, we'll give more time to an extended, guided meditation on each of these gospel scenes, with the aim of developing a real sense of what it was like to be there, and a deeper appreciation of the meaning of these events for ourselves and for the world.

Some of the meditations in these weeks take a bit longer than twelve minutes, so rather than truncate them, we have dispensed with the usual time limit and allowed some days to go up to fifteen or sixteen minutes.

In this way, we hope, over the three weeks, to grow in our understanding of ourselves as well as of God, to appreciate more fully God's call in our lives, and the part we may have to play in God's saving plan, and to prepare ourselves, too, to celebrate with great joy the birth of our Saviour at Christmas.




return to main menu

Produced by Jesuit Media Initiatives, 114 Mount Street, London W1K 3AH.  Email: jmi@jesuits.org.uk
© Jesuit Media Initiatives