Advent starts this Sunday!

Buy your Advent candles this week!

Also, the Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday after the Third Sunday of Advent (Gaudete Sunday) are the days of Advent Embertide.

Room Blessings!

I just stumbled across this blog by the Chaplin of the Newman Center at George Washington University. GWU is blessed to have this priest. I hope he's there for a long time. I'm going to start follwing his blog (swell, add another to the list of 100+ blogs I already follow) because my daughter will be heading off to college next year and I'd like to get good ideas for bringing her back to the Faith.

Anyways, here's Father Greg's idea, room blessings...

One of the things that that means is that no matter what happened in your room before you began living there, grace now dwells there as a result of a room blessing. It's certainly scary to think of what might have happened in your room in the past several years before you got there - blasphemy against God or the Church, things of the occult (witchcraft, wicca, ouija boards, tarot cards, etc.), alcohol or drug abuse, impure sexual activity, pornography, contraception, self-injury (cutting), inappropriate language or jokes, pirating of materials (videos, music, software), gossip, etc. These sins aren't exclusive to college dorm rooms, of course; Catholics everywhere should have their homes and apartments blessed. But, everyone here knows that sin is all around us...and, serious sin at that. So, the prudent and practical GW Catholic student approaches his or her room as being a place where serious sin might have happened, and so he or she wants to eradicate all of that with a blessing by a priest.