Ad te, Domine, levavi animam meam: Deus meus, in te confido, non erubescam (Antithon Ps 24:1) To you, O Lord, I lift up my soul. O my God, in you I trust, let me not be put to shame.

That is how St. Josemaría would express the tenor of his prayer, especially now as we begin Advent: He would lift up his heart in humble prayer asking God to open his mind to what the Lord wanted.

It is a time to look up to God and prepare for his coming, his birth, his arrival, his advent in the liturgy.

In the liturgy of Advent the church invites us to stir up our desires for conversion, awaken our souls because after all our challenges, our soul may have gotten tired, weakened, discouraged, and lacking in true supernatural vision.

Imagine if you could really stir up our soul, thanks to God’s grace injecting itself into our soul.

Excita, quaesumus, Domine, potentiam tuam, et veni (Collect). Stir up your power, we beseech you, O Lord, and come.

We can ask: where does my soul need to be stirred up? Perhaps I feel a bit like a bowl of plum pudding; It is filled with dry dates and walnuts, and other dried fruit that needs to be stirred, shaken, and roused up to make it more malleable. Otherwise, it would be like thick sludge, not real pudding. My soul needs to be wound-up and set aflame like the souls of the saints who saw the time of Advent as yet another opportunity to convert and to begin again.

A commitment to daily prayer will awaken in us this desire for conversion, to remove excess attachments to human comforts, and mere human vision, and refine our desire to be the best version of ourselves.

These daily 5-minute meditations may be the spark we need. 

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