"As the autumn season fades and winter begins, the world becomes still. Everything around us turns pale and drab. It chills us...Here is the moment to conquer the melancholy of time; here is the moment to say softly and sincerely what we know by faith. This is the season for the word of faith to be spoken in faith...: 'Listen, my heart, God has already begun to celebrate in the world and in you his Advent. He has taken the world and its time to his heart, softly and gently, so softly that we can miss it. He has even planted his own incomprehensible life in this time (we call it his eternity and we mean thereby that which is nameless, which is wholly other from the time that makes us so hopelessly sad). And this is precisely what happens in you yourself, my heart. It is called the grace of faith, the grace of the gradual falling away of the fear of time, of the fear that fades away because he who is more powerful than time (which he made to be redeemed into eternity) has done great things to it. A now of eternity is in you, a now that no longer has any denial before it or behind it. And this now has already begun to gather together your earthly moments into itself."'
The Eternal Year, Karl Rahner, BX2170/C55/R33, Chapter One.
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"The final end and consummation of Christ's strange work is the restoration of all things in Himself and for the heavenly Father's glory...It is to the accomplishment of this divine plan that Advent so eagerly looks, and for which it so fervently prays. Nothing less than the absolutely complete and publicly proclaimed victory of the Lord suffices for the Church which so loves Him and it is in this sense that one must understand the holy impatience of the ever-recurring Advent cry, 'Come.'
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