How to use the Little Blue Book
Each 24-hour day has 1,440 minutes.
You're asked to give six of those 1,440 minutes to prayer for the next. 43 days.
You can give more than six minutes if you wish. But the main thing is to pray every day.
People who pray regularly will tell you that it works best if you do it at a set time every day. The main thing is to make it part of your schedule, not something you try to squeeze in whenever. It can vary at times, but you need a basic pattern. You can't simply say, "I'll do it when I get a chance."
This Little Blue Book will be your companion, and you can take it with you wherever you wish. You can write in it, tear out a page and put it in your pocket, get extra copies and mail them to friends or family members and have a sense of praying with them each day.
The left-hand page is like a buffet table with a variety of thoughts about the Advent and Christmas seasons, the feast of the day, or various traditions and customs.
The key is the right-hand page. On that page each day (except Sundays), we'll walk through the first part of Luke's Gospel a little bit at a time.
All of this provides the framework for you to enjoy one of our oldest traditions of prayer called lectio divina - sacred reading. We take a short Scripture passage and simply let God speak to us through the words, guiding us to reflections that sometimes seem to come from nowhere.
People are often surprised at how easy it is to pray this way, and how deep such prayer can be.
It can change your day ... change your life.
Throughout the Advent season, this blog will feature some of the meditations and reflections featured in the Little Blue Book as a way to enhance our Advent preparations. If you would like to follow along or read the entire book, copies are available at St. Peter Church after Masses and in the Administration Bldg.