Little Blue Books for Advent

Each 24-hour day has 1,440 minutes. Beginning on the first Sunday of Advent, you are 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 key 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.”

The 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, where we’ll reflect on the first reading assigned for the Mass each day. This will give many people a chance to reflect on and pray passages that they may have seldom heard proclaimed or preached about at liturgy.

On the first Sunday of Advent, we begin our program of ‘six minutes a day.’ You can pick up your Little Blue Book in church on the weekend of November 26th and 27th. If you are shut-in and not able to attend church, please contact the office at 309-762-2362 and we will be sure you will get a book.