For years, lovers of Christmas have awoken on Christmas day fatigued and overstimulated from weeks of gift buying, card sending, and cookie eating done in the name of the Spirit of Christmas. As wonderful as these activities can be, the sense that we are preparing for the Light of the World to come into our hearts and homes can get lost in translation.

These days, something else is undermining our tidings of comfort and joy besides the traditional Christmas rush. We are living in a highly polarized world where political storms, personal storms, and ecclesial storms swirl around us. Differences of opinion naturally exist within every community, but the mean-spiritedness that characterizes many of our opinions and conversations today is toxic, and light years away from Christian sensibilities. As Fr. Ron Rolheiser puts it, we have become “angry people with a highly selective sense of compassion.”

This Faith Sharing Guide offers an invitation to make Advent the “eye” in the storm of our busy divided world. It creates a place of light winds and fair weather where, together with the members of your faith sharing group, you will spend one hour each of the four weeks of Advent reading scripture and commentaries selected to help you explore how you might become a bridge builder across our differences, and a stakeholder in Isaiah’s prophecy:

The wolf shall dwell with the lamb,
and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat,
and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together,
and a little child shall lead them. Isa 11:6

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