30 Nov First Sunday of Advent

Two days after December’s First Friday came the first Sunday of Advent.  Advent was Delp’s favorite season of the Church year.  Now, under the most extreme conditions of his life—isolation in a prison cell, his hands in manacles, he begins to ponder the meaning for him of the Christian teaching of the Incarnation.

And so he begins his meditation on the First Sunday of Advent: “Unless a man has been shocked to his depths at himself and the things he is capable of, as well as at the failings of humanity as a whole, he cannot possibly understand the full import of Advent.”

He uses his own situation as a metaphor for the situation of humanity as a whole: imprisoned with hands tied, unable of one’s own power to unlock the door to freedom.  The only route to freedom, he writes, is surrender, to hand oneself over.