During her life, Mother Angelica offered a treasury of timeless wisdom. Looking back at old episodes of her LIVE broadcast show, you are guaranteed to find something that resonates with you on your faith journey even today!
During a 36-year-old episode of Mother Angelica LIVE Classics (the episode originally aired on December 3, 1991), Mother Angelica shares a side of the Advent season that many overlook.
During the broadcast, she asks the studio audience,
“Advent is a time of penance. Did you know that? Anyone know that?”
The audience chuckles in response, as it is not a well-known aspect of the Advent season.
Mother Angelica goes on to explain that Advent is a time of preparation for Christmas, and Christmas requires a lot of preparation.
“Well, do you realize how much work goes [into] preparing for Christmas? You’ve got to get a tree, and then you go to decorate it, and then most of the decorations from last year got dirty, and some of them broke. So you’re running back and forth with new decorations,” she begins.
Mother continues to explain the all-too-familiar scenario of all things Christmas chaos. Tough family dynamics, wrapping presents, and everything in between.
“All of these things come in your mind, and there goes Christmas. And sometimes you’re so exhausted you haven’t the slightest idea of what just happened.”
As the episode continues, Mother Angelica offers some timeless wisdom about fully entering into the liturgical season of Advent.
“God doesn’t want your pocketbook. He wants your heart. He wants your mind. He wants you to be filled with Him. He doesn’t want all these kinds of sacrifices that you just kind of drop in front of Him and then go your way, living a sinful life,” she says.
She goes on to ask the audience to imagine the transformation from what they are to what God wants them to be.
Before she directs her focus to the calls coming in, she clarifies:
“I’m all for trees and decorations, but not at the expense of a lack of repentance in my heart, a lack of real repentance that says, ‘Lord, I haven’t given You an ounce of time…’”
The series of calls that follow focuses on the theme of offering up our repentance, faults, and struggles to Jesus in preparation for his birth on Christmas.
As always, she gives timeless advice.
As the Mother Angelica LIVE episode comes to a close, Mother shares a special Advent tradition they partake in at the monastery.
“In our monastery, we have a little custom. We put an empty crib out and then we have a little pan of straw, bag of straw. And when we do something for the Lord that’s really hard or what we call virtue-like…We go pick a straw and we put it in the crib. And I said to the sisters,’ Now I hope this crib is full of straw for Christmas Eve!’”
She goes on to explain how this tradition would be a great activity to do as a family.