Peoples with eyes tired from screens and headlines, you say the night is too long, the news too heavy, the future closed. Yet at the threshold of this new liturgical year, a first flame is lit — tiny, almost ridiculous in the world’s eyes: this is Advent.
Advent is not a commercial countdown but a school of watchfulness. It is not about filling the cupboards of the house, but opening the door of the heart. It is not about speeding up time, but sanctifying it, breath by breath, silence by silence.
Today the Lord whispers to the whole Earth: “I am looking for those who keep watch. Not specialists in fear, but guardians of light. Not prophets of doom, but sentinels of hope.”
To keep watch does not mean to deny the wounds of the world. Wars still roar, exiles cross the seas, forests burn, hearts harden into opposing camps. Yet in the midst of all this, there are hands that lift up, forgiveness spoken in secret, hidden gestures of sharing. Advent begins there: in those tiny ‘yeses’ no one sees, but Heaven receives.
At the threshold of this new liturgical time, God does not arrive with noise and thunder; he comes as a discreet visitor inside your very “today”. He sits within your weariness, your fear of tomorrow, your sleepless nights, and says to you: “Let me enter into the way you look, speak, and decide.”
I call you, the one reading these lines, to become a watcher for your people: someone who refuses to repeat words of hatred, who keeps a corner of the heart burning for those everyone forgets, who chooses each day a concrete gesture of silence, prayer, reconciliation, or tenderness.
You may feel too small for your watchfulness to change anything. But dawn never arrives all at once: it begins with a thin line of light scarcely visible, and then the whole sky yields to it.
The night is not shortened by violence, but by a single lamp that refuses to go out.