Today is gaudete Sunday, or the Sunday of joy.The liturgical readings and prayers are bubling over with joy as Christmas is coming closer and the Lord is near! "Rejoice in the Lord always; again I say rejoice!" our entrance antiphon urges us.

It may be that your personal mood doesn't quite match the Church's mood on this particular Sunday. The last thing you'd be tempted to do is to burst into joy. Advent is a season that can carry a lot of baggage with it. For one thing, it carries the baggage of the year. Because it comes at year's end, it tends to contain within itself the previous year's memory. What has happened to us in the course of the year can weigh heavily on our minds in the run-up to Christmas. The dregs may be only a bitter reminder of the year that is past. It may not have been a good year for you. The reason for that may be a bereavement in your family, recurring anxiety about your own health, a breakdown in a relationship that has sustained you for a long time. It may be that the prospect of Christmas, instead of raising your spirits, only fills you with dread. At the end of a difficult year comes this seasonal insistence that everybody be happy. Whether you're in the mood for it or not, the general expectation is that you'll enjoy yourself. The Church's whoops of joy today is part of that expectation. It may well leave you cold.

Even if the year that's gone hasn't been a tragic or lonely one for us, the mood we're in this morning may not match at all the exuberance of this Sunday. There may be a considerable gap for all of us between the liturgical and the actual. Apart from the occasional heartbreak we may suffer in life, there's enough hassle in the daily struggle to keep all of us under pressure. Bills to be paid, mortgage repayments to be met, children to be minded and fed, relationships within the family to be nurtured and sustained. There's enough wear and tear for all of us in the business of living. The approach of Christmas with its additional pressures may only make things worse. It will cost more for a start. It will lengthen the queues. It will put deadlines into our days. It will put resolutions into our mouths that this is the last Christmas we'll be sending presents or cards! It's all a 'cod', we'll be telling ourselves and anybody else who has the time to listen! We're so flustered and preoccupied at this time of year that a Sunday like Gaudete Sunday goes by in a blur!

It's a great pity if that happens to be the case because, whether we're preoccupied or brokenhearted, there are messages for all of us in today's liturgy. We lit the candle of joy at the beginning of our Mass, telling us that Christ is our light, that of all the Christmas lights, he's the one that really matters. We have been urged to 'prepare a way for the Lord' (jn 1:23). It reminds us that Christ's coming to us at Christmas requires our coming to him during Advent. A season like Advent that hasn't a spiritual dimension is a season that's gone off the rails. The message for the broken-hearted is mainly in the first reading. It tells us that one of the reasons Christ came to us as Saviour is 'to bring good news to the poor; to bind up hearts that are broken.' At the beginning of his ministry, Jesus stood up in his local synagogue and read from that very text. This was the text he regarded as defining his ministry During his life on earth he was closest to people in their need. The more broken you are, the more broken you feel, the more he wants to help. He begs us to come to him and to take him at his word.

There's another very important message for us in the second reading. You know yourselves that in the middle of our daily preoccupations, or more especially in the depths of our despair, we sometimes wonder what the whole thing is about anyway. St Paul supplies us with an answer. He urges us to 'hold on to what is good and avoid every form of evil.' that 'there is no need to worry, because the Lord is near.' (1 Th 5:23). The coming he has in mind is not the Christmas coming but the Second Coming at the end of time. What he's saying to us is that there is purpose in our sometimes bewildering or painful existence. Life is not a meaningless or senseless succession of events over which nobody has any control. God is working in our world and helping us providentially towards our destiny. We are not on a roller-coaster to nowhere. The end of the journey on which we've set out will be a personal encounter with the Lord. He's with us now as our healer and our light. He'll be there as our merciful Saviour when all our Advents are over. If you can believe that, if you can put your faith in that - then perhaps a little rejoicing might be in order, even if the only one to hear it is yourself!

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