{"id":2109,"date":"2017-11-08T11:37:03","date_gmt":"2017-11-08T16:37:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.paracletepress.com\/?p=2109"},"modified":"2017-11-02T11:37:57","modified_gmt":"2017-11-02T15:37:57","slug":"a-daily-reader-of-simple-and-direct-advent-reflections","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.paracletepress.com\/index.php\/a-daily-reader-of-simple-and-direct-advent-reflections\/","title":{"rendered":"A daily reader of simple and direct Advent reflections"},"content":{"rendered":"

Your Light Gives Us Hope: 24 Daily Practices for Advent<\/a>
\nAnselm Grun, OSB<\/h1>\n

Drawing on his experience as a spiritual director, he offers practices for personal devotion or for family prayer for each day of Advent, approaching the festive season consciously, making it a blessed time for ourselves and our families.\u00a0<\/em><\/h2>\n

From the translator’s Foreword:<\/em><\/p>\n

Fr. Anselm Gr\u00fcn needs little introduction in Germany. He is well-known as a best-selling author of books on Christian faith and spirituality, which together have sold more than 14 million copies, and regularly gives talks and workshops across the country as well as appearing frequently on television. He does all this while living out his vow of \u201cstability of place\u201d at the Benedictine abbey of M\u00fcnsterschwarzach, not far from the city of W\u00fcrzburg in Lower Franconia. There, he joins his brothers in what St. Benedict described in his Rule as \u201ca school for the Lord\u2019s service,\u201d which in this case is a large community of monks with a strong local ministry and a global vision of mission.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Within this community, which he joined as a nineteen-year-old in the early 1960s, Fr. Gr\u00fcn joins his brothers in the commitment to \u201cwork and pray,\u201d as the motto of the Benedictine order puts it. For more than thirty years, he held the important position St. Benedict called the \u201ccellarer,\u201d the monk charged with managing the provisions of the monastery and thus responsible, as the Rule puts it, \u201cfor everything\u201d\u2014a kind of CFO for the abbey\u2019s business operations. In this role, he had oversight of a workforce employing more than three hundred people in some twenty departments, hardly what we think of when we imagine a monk observing the rule of silence.<\/p>\n

Yet while his work as cellarer surely grounded him in the often stressful realities of modern business, the wisdom he brings in his writings has more to do with St. Benedict\u2019s daring conviction that \u201cthe divine presence is everywhere\u201d\u2014in our work and in our prayer, in the monastery as in \u201cthe world.\u201d Readers will come to recognize the impact of this belief throughout the pages that follow.<\/p>\n

All this suggests why, in reading Fr. Gr\u00fcn, one does not encounter the voice of a reclusive monk. His God is not hiding somewhere in the monastery, out of reach of ordinary folks. On the contrary, and in keeping with the Advent tidings, he discovers God in the scriptural promises that point to the One who comes among us, the incarnate Lord in Jesus of Nazareth. At the heart of this season, we come face-to-face\u2014quite literally\u2014with the God who takes up human life and lives as one with us. This is the Messiah announced in Advent as Emmanuel, the God-with-us who was born in a simple manger in Bethlehem. And it is this God who seeks to be present \u201ceverywhere\u201d among us in our lives today.<\/p>\n

This day-by-day devotional guide to Advent appeared in the original German edition in 2015 and quickly became a well-loved companion for thousands of readers: Roman Catholic and Protestant, doubters and seekers. They found here what they have come to expect from Fr. Gr\u00fcn\u2019s wide-ranging writings: namely, nourishment for their spiritual hunger and illumination for their path in life. It is a privilege to bring this devotional gem to English readers.<\/p>\n

What you will find in these pages, meant to be read and pondered day by day during the weeks leading up to Christmas, is a message shaped by a dialogue between theology and psychology, faith and spirituality, divine revelation and human experience. Throughout the short chapters here, Fr. Gr\u00fcn meets us in our longing for wholeness, the desire that marks Advent as the \u201coverture\u201d to the larger symphony of the church\u2019s year. These daily readings offer a centering path through these often hectic weeks, reminding us, as the opening words of the Rule put it, to learn to \u201clisten . . . with the ears of [our] heart.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0Mark S. Burrows Bochum, Germany<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Your Light Gives Us Hope: 24 Daily Practices for Advent Anselm Grun, OSB Drawing on his experience as a spiritual director, he offers practices for personal devotion or for family prayer for each day of Advent, approaching the festive season … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2109","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-paraclete-press"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.paracletepress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2109","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.paracletepress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.paracletepress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.paracletepress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.paracletepress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2109"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.paracletepress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2109\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.paracletepress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.paracletepress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.paracletepress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}