Your Free St. Óscar Romero Advent Devotional

Incarnation and Liberation

At the risk of sounding totally cliché, it’s almost time for Advent? Well, we still have a few weeks of ordinary time left, but as you are making your Advent plans, I wanted to make this free devotional available to you.

My first introduction to my favorite saint, Óscar Romero, was through his beautiful Advent homilies. Years ago, during a homily at my parish, my deacon quoted a little snippet of one of them, and I raced home and ordered a book so I could read them all.

They are majestic, so deeply rooted in both the present moment, the disastrous violence of El Salvador in the 1970s, and in the mysterious temporality of God, which stretches out further than our minds can comprehend and yet is somehow always intersecting with us here on earth.

The incarnation, Romero reminds us, is all around us, and it’s this sacralization of all humanity, of all the world, that will lead us into true liberation.

The very first devotional I ever wrote was on Romero’s Advent homilies from 1977, on the same readings we heard in the lectionary in 2019. This year, we’ll hear the same readings he preached on in 1978, and those powerful homilies form the bulk of this devotional.

Advent will be a short season this year, with the fourth Sunday of Advent falling on Christmas Eve (pray for your liturgists, musicians, and clergy!). This year we really only have three weeks to prepare our hearts for Emmanuel, God with us.

But I still wanted to give you all four Advent homilies and one from midnight mass on Christmas Eve, just in case you want to linger with them over the Octave of Christmas, or, who knows, all the way to Candlemas. (I will say, too, that when my kids were smaller, I routinely finished my Advent devotionals just in time for Lent, and that’s totally okay too! Time spent with God is time spent with God, no matter when it takes place).

Each homily is broken up into five sections, and I’ve written a few meditative prayer suggestions to accompany each section. There are no set days for the devotional—my hope is that you will come to it and rest in it whenever your heart feels drawn, whenever it works for your schedule.

It’s a 55-page PDF with a cover I painted down in my little closet turned office.

You can download it here.

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A Few Hopeful Things

-This past weekend I had the joy and honor of preaching all four masses at my parish. I still can’t get over what a gift this was, and what it meant to my children to be invited up to process out with me. I wrote a little bit about my experience here, and you can find the recording here.

-Kaitlin Curtice has new children’s book out that looks so lovely and will perhaps soothe all our souls as we move into the cold and darkness ahead of us: Winter’s Gifts: An Indigenous Celebration of Nature.

-You. It’s been so wonderful getting to meet some of you (virtually and in person!), and you give me so much hope that I am not alone in seeking a faith that does justice. Thank you.

Waiting with you in joyful hope,
Cameron