ADVENT 2 - THE CANDLE OF PEACE

As we continue our Advent journey on the second Sunday of Advent, we light the Candle of Peace. On this day we seek to illuminate and explore how through our relationship with God in Christ, we discover deep and lasting peace, "peace like a river," as the prophet Isiah writes. This peace of Christ, which as St. Paul writes, "passes all understanding," is a deep rootedness of our life—our heart and soul, our true and sacred self--in the soil of God's presence and love. This living, breathing connection is the source of "shalom," which is hard to translate into English. It's a holy sense of well-being, a joyful contentedness that anchors our inner life. This eludes words because it touches on the blessed mystery of our life living in and flowing out of God's life. But this we know and this we declare on this second Sunday of Advent: that the origin, the fount, the source and well-spring of true and lasting peace is found in Christ. And the challenge, as Fr. Ben has noted, is to live our lives from the inside out. When this happens, our lives become the spring of living water, in which peace, like a river, flows from us into a parched world that longs to taste this life-giving water. 

In Christ,

Andrew+