Advent
The Advent mystery is the a mystery of emptiness, of poverty, of limitation.
It must be so. Otherwise it could not be a mystery of hope.
The Advent mystery is a mystery of beginning: but it is also the mystery of an end. The fullness of time is the end of all that was not yet fullness. It is the completion of all that was still incomplete, all that was still partial. It is the fulfillment in oneness of all that was fragmentary.(Thomas Merton: «Advent: Hope or Delusion» in Meditations on Liturgy (Oxford: Mowbray, 1976), p. 48)
