STEP TWO - Homily for the Second Sunday of Advent

During Advent, the priests of the Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas will be walking through the basic Gospel message. This week focuses on the second part of the Gospel: that we are born on a battlefield and that a spiritual enemy is intent upon our enslavement and degradation.  "Hell is not to love any more, madame. Not to love any more! That sounds quite ordinary to you. To a human being still alive, it means to love less or love elsewhere. To understand is still a way of loving. But suppose this faculty which seems so inseparably ours, of our very essence, should disappear! Oh, prodigy! To stop loving, to stop understanding—and yet to live. The error common to us all is to invest these damned with something still inherently alive, something of our own inherent mobility, whereas in truth time and movement have ceased for them; they are fixed for ever. Alas, if God’s own hand were to lead us to one of these unhappy things, even if once it had been the dearest of our friends, what could we say to it? Truly, if one of us, if a living man, the vilest, most contemptible of the living, were cast into those burning depths, I should still be ready to share his suffering, I would claim him from his executioner, to share his suffering! The sorrow, the unutterable loss of those charred stones which once were men, is that they have nothing more to be shared."  —Georges Bernanos, Diary of a Country Priest