Make Room: An Intro to Advent 2025

Welcome to a Season of Space

Advent invites a strange and holy tension: we live in the now and the not yet. There is longing and preparation, waiting and hope. This year the invitation is simple and radical — make room for the One who wants to fill every hollow of our hearts.

Why Make Space?

When God gives a gift in Advent, sometimes it looks like an empty box. That emptiness is not absence but capacity — space to receive. If our lives are already full of noise, shopping lists, and to-do items, we miss the quiet in which God meets us.

“What he's given us is space. It's capacity to be able to receive him.”

Protecting that space means we can actually be filled — not with more tasks, but with the presence of God. The practice of making room is not about a minimalist aesthetic. It is about receiving spiritual nourishment: the Eucharist, contemplative prayer, and quiet attention.

Practical Ways to Make Room This Advent

Here are practical, gentle ways to create margins for prayer without turning your whole life upside down.

• Read the introduction first. The Advent devotional In Time (Living in the Now and Not Yet) opens with a powerful invitation. Reading the introduction before the season helps shape your attention. 
• Invite one friend. Personal invitations change everything. Asking someone to do a devotional with you makes them feel seen, and it anchors your own commitment.
• Protect a prayer space. Carve out a chair, a corner, or a bedside table where you consistently meet God. Small rituals — a candle, an image, holy water — help your body remember what your heart already knows. 
• Try daily mass. Even one extra week of Eucharistic presence can re-orient your life. The Eucharist is a meal; God sets a table daily for His children. If logistics feel impossible, start small and be resolutely determined.
• Use worshipful music to re-center. When you struggle to begin prayer, play contemplative worship or instrumental tracks that point your attention toward God rather than yourself.
• Set an alarm or rearrange your schedule. Small structural choices — an alarm, waking earlier, or shifting a routine — make space for consistent union with God.

On Hardness and Growth

Making room is often hard. Family dynamics, work, and fatigue make silence feel impossible. Yet hardness is not the same as wrong. Resistance trains and strengthens us. The spiritual life includes real discipline — but the discipline is always ordered to intimacy.

“Just because it's hard doesn't mean that it's wrong.”

When you intentionally step into the hard places of prayer, you discover that the deepest consolation often arrives in the middle of that struggle. The Eucharist, daily prayer, and repeated small acts of obedience form a pattern of receiving that becomes sweeter and more necessary over time.

Look at Jesus

The most practical spiritual direction is also the simplest: look at Jesus. When distraction and self-absorption threaten your time of prayer, return to His face. Use an image, a gospel passage, or even an imaginative scene where you meet Him. The saints across centuries have taught that gazing upon the Holy Face dissolves everything else.

“Everything disappears when you're just looking at his face.”

Gather, Grow, Go — A New Rhythm for the Member Community

For 2026 a simple rhythm can help sustain your spiritual life beyond the season: Gather, Grow, Go.

1. Gather — Meet in the BIS Member Community to pray and encourage one another.
2. Grow — Study together (Lent, a summer mentorship, and Advent studies are natural anchors).
3. Go — Take the insight and practices you receive and live them out in your local community.

This rhythm encourages intentional pause between seasons: we intentionally practice together, then step out to share and embody what we received.

Advent Resources and Invitations

The Advent devotional In Time is a companion for this work of waiting and making space. If you need a starting point, the introduction contains an image and invitation that will shape your approach to the whole season.

For men in your life, consider grabbing Feast — doing devotionals together builds bonds and shifts household rhythms.

Final Encouragement

This Advent is an invitation to be resolutely determined in small things: show up for prayer, open the empty box of space in your heart, and let God fill it. The point is not to add another item to your checklist but to create room for the greatest gift — God Himself.

Begin with one small step today: tidy a corner, set an alarm, invite a friend, or simply place a crucifix where you will see it. Keep returning to His face. He is waiting to dine with you.

Short Prayer

Lord, help us make room this Advent. Give us courage to protect silence, grace to return when distracted, and joy to receive you when you come. Fill the empty spaces with your presence. Amen.

For those preparing, consider reading the introduction to your Advent devotional and planning one concrete change that will help you keep that space all season long.