Preparing for the Most Intense Week of Advent

I still haven't purchased Advent candles! Whenever I am tempted to say to myself "you are a failure" I remember what St. Ignatius says--that this is the voice of the bad spirit, not the voice of God. Then I am immensely cheered because, while I know I am a failure, God himself has come to redeem me and this is the season when we remember the nature of that redemption:

Christ came,
born as an infant
to live life as a man
before sacrificing himself
to re-create victimhood,
(as he created and re-creates all things)
changing the sufferer of evil 
from casualty to conqueror.

 And then I rejoice.

I have been reading!

• This week I supported Bad Catholic on Patreon, because (as below) I listened to one of the albums of Dear Other so many times that I felt guilty of an abuse of the limited possession granted through Bandcamp. Dear Other is helmed by one Marc Barnes, who is the eponymous bad catholic. 
• I finished my thesis proposal at the beginning of the month, after re-reading through a significant amount of Josef Pieper. 
• I also wrote a final paper on the Apocalypse of John. In connection with that class I finished reading "The Apocalypse of John", a commentary by Sean P. Kealy CSSP.
•  I checked out an optimistic stack of Charles Williams out of the library.

I have also been listening to music for Advent. 

• My playlist on Spotify, an evil platform which I hope to discard at some point in the next few years, is available by clicking the link which follows these words: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3600tSgFFWvo7Js1ug8lDD?si=ODJ_HygTSqCnuT2l-o8gZ
• I have been listening to Harrison Lemke, Technicolor Nativity, available at his website which you can reach, on this day in 2019, through this electronic pathway: https://harrisonlemke.com/ 
• The lovely Sister Sinjin have set some poetry written by Christina Rossetti to music with the release of their album The Face of the Deep. The poetry comes from Rossetti's book, The Face of the Deep: A devotional commentary on the Apocalypse. The book is available for purchase and perusal through a variety of digital mediums. The music is for now available free on the website https://sistersinjin.bandcamp.com.