Advent Ramble

Advent brings a new year of grace with its promise of a new beginning for each of us. May we enter into this privileged season that the Church calls a time of "devout and expectant delight." (Universal Norms for the Liturgical Year)

In my early experience of religious life it was beat into us that Advent wasn't a penitential season. Like a lot of what I was taught early on, this needs more nuance. Certainly Advent is a time for metanoia, for turning our attention toward the One who is our deepest delight, to a stance of devout expectation for the God who is arriving fresh in each moment. As John the Baptist will cry out on the Second Sunday of Advent, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand."

At hand. The Kingdom is perpetually about to be. This is the patient and humble God who awaits the friendship of those who will surrender to his kingship in their hearts in whatever the next moment is for them, whether it be prayer or work or rest, or especially a moment of encounter with another soul.

This attentiveness to the God who is arriving, this adventitious God, is the spiritual work of those of us who live in this graced and blessed time in between the first and second comings of Christ. Advent invites us to a contemplative attentiveness in this in-betweenness, as we look back with joy to the humility of the incarnation and forward to the glory of the final fulfillment of everything in Christ.

This attentiveness in quiet prayer is what makes a space for God to be born anew in our own hearts. And if our hearts are sometimes dark or cold, let us rejoice all the more, for that is just the sort of place God wills to be born.

As one of my Capuchin formation directors told us at the beginning of Advent, "Let us begin again for the first time."

Preparing the Way of the Lord

“John went throughout the whole region of the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.” (Luke 3:3)

John the Baptist is one of the central characters of Advent; he is the Forerunner who prepares the way of the Lord. By repentance and the forgiveness of sins we too prepare ourselves as a place for the Lord to be born anew. By repentance, because when we let go of sin and attachment we make room in our minds and hearts, preparing a space for God within. By receiving forgiveness, because it is by experiencing God’s mercy that we are able to mirror that mercy to others; knowing God’s mercy in our own lives, we become ourselves the way that the Lord prepares for divine mercy to come into the world.

(reflection prepared for our vocation office's social media)

Dwelling Richly

(Reflection prepared for our vocation department's social media)

In the first reading for the Mass of Christmas Eve morning we hear how God takes the opportunity of David’s plans to build the house of God, the Temple, to turn the discernment around: it is God, rather, who will establish a house for David. (2 Samuel 7:11)

At Christmas we see this prophecy begin to come to its final fulfillment. Mary, in bearing the Lord in her womb, becomes the first tabernacle and the exemplar of the Church to come. She is, as St. Francis of Assisi puts it, the Virgin made Church. (A Salutation of the Blessed Virgin Mary)

Jesus Christ, who was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary, invites us into Holy Communion with him, that we, as the Church, might become a dwelling place for God in the Spirit. (Ephesians 2:22) In this way, the great feast of Pentecost, at which we recall and celebrate the Spirit as the abiding presence of Christ in his Church, peeks out even now at Christmas. Indeed, Pentecost is the fulfillment of the prophecy given to David; God builds for us a house in which he himself will dwell among us, our home and mother the Church.

As Blessed Isaac of Stella writes: “Christ dwelt for nine months in the tabernacle of Mary’s womb. He dwells until the end of the ages in the tabernacle of the Church’s faith. He will dwell for ever in the knowledge and love of each faithful soul.” (Office of Readings for Saturday of the 2nd week of Advent)

When you, faithful soul, discover the unique and unrepeatable way that Christ desires to dwell in you richly (Colossians 3:16), you have discerned your vocation.

Heralds of the Great King

(Reflection prepared for our vocation department's social media)

Each year the 2nd Sunday of Advent recalls the preaching of St. John the Baptist, the Forerunner of the Lord, sent to prepare his way and announce his coming. In this way John is one of the principal characters of the Advent season, which has the “twofold character” of a time to “prepare for Christmas when Christ's first coming to us is remembered [and] as a season when that remembrance directs the mind and heart to await Christ's Second Coming at the end of time.” (General Norms for the Liturgical Year)

Between the first and final comings of the Lord there is a third—his quiet and hidden arrival in the hearts and lives of those who find the willingness to surrender to grace. This “middle coming is like a road that leads from the first coming to the last.” (St. Bernard, Office of Readings for Wednesday of the 1st Week of Advent). This is where we are in the Advent season, recalling with joy the Nativity of the Lord, looking forward with devout expectation to his final advent at the end of time, and witnessing to his desire to be born anew, here and now, in our own lives.

Francis of Assisi, while still experimenting and figuring out his own vocation, once fell prey to bandits in the woods. While attacking him they asked who he was. He answered, “‘I am the herald of the great King!’” (Thomas of Celano, First Life of St. Francis, chapter 7) Considering not his own misfortune, he saw in his attackers the suffering of being trapped by evil and sin, and announced to them the good news of God’s Kingdom. Like John the Baptist, Francis found his vocation in announcing the God who desires to arrive in our lives anew in each moment.

How am I being called to witness to God’s desire to come and dwell in the hearts of the men and women of our time? How will I be a forerunner of the Lord and a herald of the great King?

Advent

I've come to love Advent more and more. Especially the beginning when the readings and prayers make it clear that we're not yet 'preparing for Christmas' but looking forward in hope to the coming of the Lord in glory. Advent invites us to contemplate the in-between-ness of our existence, living as we do after the first coming of Jesus Christ and before the second.

But we don't push this dichotomy too far, for in our spiritual life, our mystical life, the incarnation of the Word and the parousia of Jesus Christ turn out to coincide; the Bridegroom of our souls is always arriving by grace.

That's why Jesus in the Gospel we have this year for the first Sunday of Advent exhorts us to "Be watchful! Be alert!"  (Mark 13:33) By quiet prayer we cultivate a watchfulness, a mindfulness in our minds and hearts, so that we may notice the graces our daily lives present to us, the graces that Providence puts in our path at each moment.

His Birth, Our Rebirth

(This is the little homily I gave to the remnant of the brethren this morning.)

"This is how the birth of Jesus Christ came about...his mother Mary...was found with child through the Holy Spirit." (Mt 1:18)

The Church was born in the same way, when the same Spirit filled the house where the apostles were gathered after the Ascension.

And every Sunday, even every day, the Church--we as Church--are regenerated right here by the Eucharist.

Just as God opened the side of Adam to form Eve, mother of all the living, so with the water and blood flowing from the side of Jesus--opened by our violence--all those brought back to life come to be fed.

This is the good news of our faith; in Christ crucified, God has transformed the violence of sin into the source of salvation. We, reborn in the same Christ conceived by the Holy Spirit in the womb of Mary, filled with the same Spirit, come to be washed and fed from the wounds of the Son become man. This is why we pray in today's Collect--the same prayer we pray three times a day in the Angelus--that the Passion and Cross of the Lord would bring us the glory of the Resurrection.

In these days, when we celebrate with joy the birth among us of the Son of God, we celebrate in the same way our regeneration in the Holy Spirit as the Church--the Body of Christ--as well as our daily and eucharistic rebirth, as John says, "not by water alone, but by water and blood." (1 Jn 5:6)

His conception in the womb of Mary is the dawn of our regeneration, his birth our rebirth.

Reek of Stupefaction

Yesterday I finally got to confession. It had been too long. In fact, it had been since the day of my pilgrimage to the bleak Via Ostiense 131/L. I just didn't know whom to ask. It's so much easier to walk up to a confessional box. When you have to pick someone, knock on his door, and ask him if he has a moment to hear your confession, that's something different. But I had been praying that the Holy Spirit let me know to whom I should try to go, and, perhaps spurred on by the beginning of the second stage of Advent yesterday,  I finally managed it.

In his counsel, the priest invited me to live these days of immediate preparation for Christmas con cuore stupito. It probably just stuck in my mind because it sounds funny to the ear of an English-speaker. 'With an amazed heart' or 'with an astonished heart,' I guess you could say. 'With a stupefied heart' doesn't really do it, but it's not an entirely useless thought; perhaps it captures something of being overwhelmed by contemplation of the mysteries at hand.

In one of the little synchronicities of grace, later on I happened to pray Night Prayer in Italian. (As I have mentioned, I don't really prefer it.) When I came to the Alma Redemptoris Mater in Italian, there was the substantive of the same word:

O santa Madre del Redentore,
porta dei cieli, stella del mare,
soccorri il tuo popolo che sta cadendo,
che anela a risorgere.
Tu che accogliendo quell'Ave di Gabriele,
nello stupore di tutto il creato,
hai generato il tuo Genitore,
vergine prima e dopo il parto,
pietà di noi peccatori.

That's the Latin natura mirante that translates in our American-English breviary as 'to the wonderment of nature' if I remember rightly.

A certain amazed, astonished, joyful wonder is the spiritual climate of Christmas. We are amazed to see that the birth of Jesus Christ reverses everything that our insecure and acquisitive minds think power and mightiness should mean. The Word of God, through whom all things are created, is born as one of us, born to plain parents, born away from home, born into a people and a place that were considered important by no known criterion of human civilization.

But Christmas is not only astonishing because it is an amazing and even scandalous revelation of God; Christmas is also invites us to wonder because it reveals who we really are, what creation really is. The creation, and we ourselves as created beings in it, as full of wonder and beauty as it all is even just on its own terms, finds in the newborn Jesus its true destiny, that we and all created being exists precisely so that God might be with us, incarnate among us. And our prayer is to sit in wonder, con cuore stupito, at the astonishing realization that we exist so that the overflowing Love we call the Blessed Trinity may love all the more by drawing us into the dynamic relations that are Himself. This is why it is the Holy Spirit--the Love the proceeds from the Father and the Son--who conceives Jesus Christ, that in the humanity of Christ we might be invited, drawn, and folded into the eternal, blessed and infinitely happy generation of the Beloved by the Lover.

Reading 'The Infancy Narratives'

I've been reading Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives on the Sundays of Advent and finished it this morning. The first thing I would say about it is that the reader does well to take seriously what the author says about the nature of the book, that it "is not a third volume, but a kind of small 'antechamber' to the two earlier volumes." It's a sweet little book of just a few chapters, but shot through with the sort of reflection that reveals a real devotion to the events recorded by Matthew and Luke. Particularly touching in this sense is the thoughtful section on the Virgin Birth:

It seems natural to me that only after Mary's death could the mystery be made public and pass into the shared patrimony of early Christianity. At that point it could find its way into the evolving complex of Christological doctrine and be linked to the confession of Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God--yet not in the manner of a story crafted from an idea, an idea reformulated as a fact, but vice versa: the event itself, a fact that was now in the public domain, became the object of reflection--understanding was sought. The overall picture of Jesus Christ shed light upon the event, and conversely, through that event, the divine logic was more deeply grasped. The mystery of his origin illuminated what came later, and conversely the developed form of Christological faith helped to make sense of that origin. Thus did Christology develop.

Another section that makes a similar point in a more general way:

The two chapters of Matthew's Gospel devoted to the infancy narratives are not a meditation presented under the guise of stories, but the converse: Matthew is recounting real history, theologically thought and interpreted, and thus he helps us to understand the mystery of Jesus more deeply.

How refreshing that is for us who absorbed so many brittle doctrines about history and fact and meaning and God--e.g. 'yes, it's just a myth' or 'yes, it's just a symbol,' 'but that means it's more true!' or 'yes, the Bible is all true, and some of it really happened'--all of these doctrines that when they are heard by unbelievers convince them more deeply that we religious people are self-deluded and full of nonsense. More and more I tend to consign such teaching to the large category of things that seemed liberating to our parents in the faith but have not delivered on such hope.

It is said by some that the Church needs to be updated according to the times, in order to be more relevant, more comprehensible, and set free from her doctrines that are offensive to the cherished ideas of contemporary society. But what they forget is that the world doesn't hate the Church because of her teachings; the world hates the Church because it hated Jesus Christ first. And those are his words, not mine.

And why should Benedict's assertions seem strange? Do we not in just the same way work out our spiritual understanding of ourselves? It is a historical fact that in the early afternoon on August 29, 1992, I walked up and out of the basement of Freeman dormitory and down the street to Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Quaker Hill, Connecticut, where a deacon of the Roman Catholic Church poured some water on me and invoked the Blessed Trinity. It really took place. You can go to the church and find a historical record of it in their office. But to know and understand what happened that day requires some theological reflection. That's how our spiritual lives work, history coming to be understood in light of God's eternity. Why should the Sacred Scriptures be any different?

I also enjoyed a little jab at academic theology delivered by the old professor. He is discussing the beginning of Matthew 2, in which Herod, following up on the inquiry of Magi, asks the chief priests and the scribes where the Messiah is to be born. Despite giving a learned and complete answer, Benedict notes that this knowledge does not prompt them to actually do anything:

The answer given by the chief priests and scribes to the wise men's question has a thoroughly practical geographical content, which helps the Magi on their way. Yet it is not only a geographical, but also a theological interpretation of the place and the event. That Herod would draw the obvious conclusion is understandable. Yet it is remarkable that his Scripture experts do not feel prompted to take any practical steps as a result. Does this, perhaps, furnish us with the image of a theology that exhausts itself in academic disputes?

maran atha

Today was my turn to be principal celebrant at Mass. Whenever my turn comes around I think first of Zechariah taking his turn in the Temple, and then of the little bits of paper you get when you 'take a number' here in Italy. (In Italy you're always taking a number.) The little thing has your number on it and written below is, è il mio turno. 'Is my turn.' There's something so cute and innocent about it, as if you were playing Uno or Monopoly insteading of waiting to attempt some arcane bureaucratic procedure in a foreign language. And once in a while it even turns out to be true, i.e. you succeed in taking your turn according to the number.

I was trying to think of something very short for a homily, such that I might have a chance to actually deliver it in Italian, but also because short is pleasing to the brethren.

It struck me as interesting that in this time of Advent, when we focus on the coming of Jesus Christ, when we are often praying in the words of St. John at the very end of the New Testament--Come, Lord Jesus!--in the gospel today (Matthew 11:28-30), it is rather Jesus who says, "Come to me."

It reminds us that we hope for the coming of Jesus Christ, that we are able to pray, Come, Lord Jesus, only because God has already given us his Spirit who prays within us.

But that's more than just a clever, pious thought. The whole mystery of Christmas is in it.

It is the Spirit who conceives the Word as the historical life of Jesus of Nazareth.

In the same way, the Spirit, whom we have received by the water of baptism and the blood of the Eucharist that flowed together from the opened side of Christ crucified, wills to conceive the presence of Christ in our humanity.

When we find ourselves praying, Come, Lord Jesus, this is, in fact, an experience of the Holy Spirit praying within us, working to accomplish in our humanity the mystery of the Annunciation. The whole dialogue of the Annunciation occurs within our own prayer, or, it could also be said, between the desire of our heart and the Spirit praying within us, such that our Christmas task becomes a simple making of our own the assent of Mary, Let it be done to me according to your word, that we may begin to nurture the Word conceived in us. In God's time, we will bring him to birth in the places, situations, and relationships of our lives.

venter tuus sicut acervus tritici

Advent underlines the 'in between-ness' of all spiritual life. We feel ourselves suspended in prayer between the first and second comings of Christ. We lie down between hope and memory, know their mutual embrace, and get up to take the path again for the first time.

Within that, I mark a couple of moments. I've been here in Italy for six months now, as I find myself entering one of the privileged seasons for the first time. I came here on the Monday after Pentecost, so it has been Ordinary Time since then.

Here's the curia chapel in her Advent outfit:

The green cloth is just a covering for the altar.

Here's a closer picture of the icon of the Virgin of the Sign:

Striking, isn't it? At first glance, I thought the four figures in the tree would be the four evangelists, but they're not. The lower two are Isaiah and Jeremiah, and the upper two are David and Solomon. The iconographer happens to be one of the friars here, so I asked him about it, and here's what he said:

"It's the tree of Jesse [who is seen dreaming at the bottom]. From the stump has sprung the branch, and from the branch the flower, that is the flower of the Virgin and from her the Savior. It is the genealogy of Jesus, with Jesse the father of David, the father of Solomon, the ancestors of Jesus, but it is also the throne of Grace and Wisdom. On top rest the seven gifts of the Spirit. The prophets indicate the expectation of the promise fulfilled in Jesus. From the stump of Jesse comes a new shoot and from the shoot a new tree."

Born Again

I love how the Sunday and weekday readings intersect this week such that yesterday we had the scene of the Annunciation and today we have the angel Gabriel's announcement to Zechariah of the birth of John the Baptist.

At first glance, the parallelism of the scenes might seem to reveal an unfairness. Both Mary and Zechariah question the announcements they receive; Mary because, presumably, she knows where babies come from, and Zechariah because he knows that he and Elizabeth had been unable to have children and had grown too old by then anyway. In response to Mary's questioning, the angel gently describes what will happen. Zechariah, on the other hand, is struck mute in punishment for his questioning, and remains speechless until John is born and named.

What gives? Is the angel Gabriel just nice to young women and mean to old men?

On the contrary, this difference in the scenes reveals the good news of Christmas.

Zechariah, because he knew the scriptures, ought to have recognized what God was up to. Several times previously in the history of the people of God, a birth from parents who were previously unable to have children or too old, or both, had signaled the beginning of new moment of salvation. So it was with Samson, Samuel, and Isaac. What was announced to Zechariah was something God was known to do, and Zechariah should have known it.

With Mary the case is different. For her, in her conception of Jesus, God doesn't just stretch the capacity of nature but goes beyond it. The miraculous births of Samson, Samuel, and Isaac are new beginnings of what already was; the birth of Jesus, as a break in the cycles of ordinary human generation as it has occurred since Adam and Eve, is a new humanity. Because what Gabriel announces to Mary is a entirely new thing that God was doing, her questioning is forgiven.

In the Nativity of Jesus, humanity has a new birth. And this is good news for all of us who know the ennui and weariness of life in the old Adam, because this 'born again-ness' is available to us by baptism into Christ's death and Holy Communion with his broken and risen humanity.

Sapida Scientia

December 17 is one of those hinge days in the Church's prayer; the season of Advent turns from the mystical and second comings of Christ to the proximate preparation for the coming commemoration of the Lord's Nativity. The beloved 'O antiphons' appear in their traditional place around the Magnificat at Vespers and are also used as the alleluia verse at Mass. The second Advent preface, an option on the third Sunday, now takes over until the vigil Mass of Christmas.

It's a liturgical hinge not unlike the one between the fourth and fifth weeks of Lent. Though Passiontide isn't named as a season or moment in the modern Roman rite, you will notice that it's still there if you pay close attention to changes in the preface at Mass and to the cycles of texts in the Liturgy of the Hours.

It gets me praying as best as I can in the Advent spirit. The season speaks to me in a basic way, as one who has known God as just that: adventitious. God arrived in my life; he slowly appeared along the way as some sort of mysterious character. Mysterious and even so subtle as to be exasperating sometimes, but still compelling enough to make me want to organize my life around his advent.

I guess I've been thinking about some of this stuff as I approach some milestones in the coming year. This winter I'll be forty years old. In the summer I'll be twenty years baptized. Over these years my life has come to be consumed--and if it were only more consumed!--with this mysterious 'God' who has made this adventitious appearance in my life. The defining elements and contours of my life now,  my celibacy, my prayer, my Franciscanism, my priesthood, all of these cluster around my stumbling attempts to understand what has happened to me in this experience, and how I might learn to be both a good host for it and also mirror its goodness and trustworthiness to others.

At certain points in the journey I've been a pretty good host for this adventitious Guest. At other times I have avoided Him, or distracted myself from interior hospitality with all sorts of trifles, inanities and excuses. And sometimes these were even made out of religion. But the good news of Christmas is that the Word, proceeding forth from the Father from all eternity, is the tasty Wisdom who wills to become flesh precisely in the world where there is no room for Him.

New Translation: Sinning Toward Christmas

You can certainly say this about the transition of praying in the new translation: one feels more like a sinner. It starts with the change in the Confiteor: it used to be that I had sinned. Now I have greatly sinned. It used to be through my fault. Now it's through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault. And in many other ways, too, the new translation is marked by a greater and more explicit language of the tragedy of sin.

There are those who have and will object to this, protesting that 'we are an Easter people' and such things, and reminding us that an obsession with sin is terribly unhealthy. I have no argument with that; as a confessor I have witnessed many times the miserable trap of so-called spiritual lives becoming about nothing but sin and the failure of our struggles against it.

On the other hand, I have to say that the renewed--some might say 'restored'--emphasis on sin speaks better to my own experience. How today's Collect resonates with the supplications of own journey in prayer!

Stir up your power, we pray, O Lord, and come,
that with you to protect us,
we may find rescue
from the pressing dangers of our sins,
and with you to set us free,
we may be found worthy of salvation.
Who live and reign...

That's something like the compunction I have found at my own most authentic moments of prayer. The realization that the roots of sin in myself are a pressing danger, revealing even my pious desires as vainglorious fantasies and my seemingly good deeds as the 'polluted rags' spoken of in these days by the prophet Isaiah. Over the course of my life as a Christian, I have found myself over and over shaken from denial about the depth, insidiousness, and rottenness of sin. From sensuality to vainglory, tricks of the mind and denial, rationalization and jadedness, I'm always discovering that I thought I was taking sin seriously when in fact I had hardly even begun.

In that spirit the new translation reminds me of an early experience in my own journey. At the beginning of my Christian life I tried to read books about prayer and the spiritual life. But I didn't get them, or maybe they didn't get me. All of their happy doctrine about 'experiences of God' and fruitful and nourishing experiences of prayer just didn't resonate with my own experience of trying to pray and find the grace of living a spiritual life. Then one day I read John Cassian on the eight principal vices and John of the Cross on the errors of beginners and the spiritual analogues of the capital sins. It was like meeting real friends for the first time. These men got me; they knew what I was going through, and their writings gave me hope.

So I am glad to have a new translation of the Mass that suits me as the miserable and grievous sinner that I am. But it's not that confessing and growing honest about the depths of our sinfulness is the end of the spiritual life. The good news of the coming great feast of the incarnation is that it is precisely in places that are dark, rejected, cold, and dirty that the Lord wills to be born. If my heart is such a place, then I have that much more hope in the ancient prayer: Come, Lord Jesus.

Advent

I have come to love Advent more and more over the years. This year, with Christmas falling on a Saturday, we have the longest possible Advent season.

On the one hand, it's just such a sweet time of year to have a fresh start of things. You get out your volume one or pars prior breviary; for various reasons it is usually the Advent-Christmas volume of the Liturgy of the Hours that is in the best condition in any given set. Combine that with a new ordo, and it gives you the feeling of fresh start on the natural level, like when you had sharp crayons on the first day of school. The day-to-day liturgical texts and colors change for the first time in what seems like ages.

On a deeper level, though, I find Advent to be among the most mystical times in the year. It is a time for us who stand in between. On the one hand we celebrate as we recall with joy the first coming of Christ, a coming that was humble, and, as we sometimes forget, secret. On the other hand, we look forward with wonder to the second coming of Christ in full and public glory, when he will bring the whole creation to its final destiny.

What's mystical to me about the season is the way in which it seems to emphasize the two comings of Christ in the reverse of their logical and temporal order: The liturgy of the early days, especially the first Sunday, focuses us on the end times, but as we go forward, and certainly by the time we arrive at the 'pre-octave' of the Nativity on December 17, we are fully into a celebration of the first coming of Christ.

We begin at the end times and proceed backwards to the dawn of our salvation in the Nativity of the Lord. We then notice how our own lives are moving in the course of a return from this recollection: the secret intimacies of grace and prayer in our own lives, in which the presence of Christ is conceived and carried in our own hearts, are moving toward a full and public harvest in the communion of the saints in heaven. Christ's movement from his conception by the Virgin to his ministry and passion and final glorification is also the journey of each Christian soul con-formed to Christ by Baptism, Confirmation, and Eucharist. Each secret and humble moment of prayer we experience in this life is destined for the final joy of heaven. Prayer is the Lord's Nativity in us, and it will become our Resurrection in Him as well.

Advent vs. Christmas

It's the big trouble that arises in one way or another every Advent: how, and to what degree, is the integrity of the Advent season to be protected from Christmas?

The question arises from an argument we have with the world. For the world, the Christmas season begins right after Thanksgiving and ends on Christmas Day. For us Catholic Christians, on the other hand, the Christmas Season begins with either the Vigil Mass of the Nativity or its Evening Prayer I, whichever comes first, and proceeds through the feasts of the Holy Family, the motherhood of Mary, the Epiphany, and the Baptism of the Lord.

While we are trying to observe the season of Advent, the world already has its Christmas songs playing and its trees decorated, and while we are celebrating the Christmas season, the world's songs are silent and its Christmas trees are already drying out in the dumpster.

To me, the critical reason that Advent has to be protected from the world's Christmas is to preserve ourselves from the shallow description of Advent as the 'time to prepare for Christmas.' It is the time to prepare ourselves for Christmas for sure, to our recalling of the Lord's birth, but Advent is equally about our "joyful hope" as we look forward to the Lord's return in glory. Even more it seems to me that the delicate spiritual task of Advent is to wrap our shallow hearts and limited minds around the truth that these are, in fact, the same thing, without one collapsing into the other. Such a spiritual task is surely impossible with eyes and ears filled with all the tackiness of the world's "celebration" of "Christmas."

To this end, each religious community or parish is furnished with zealots who protect Advent with ferocity. They refuse to attend Christmas parties, scheduled as they usually are in days of Advent. They won't put up the tree until Evening Prayer I of the Lord's Nativity has been persolved.

As has been noted in both encouragement and exasperation, I'm usually all for zealotry. But in this case, I've always had a question:

Doesn't the culture of the world we live in train us to see Christmas stuff as anticipatory? And isn't this part of what Advent is supposed to be about? For example, if children get a visit from someone playing Santa Claus, do they not experience this as something looking forward to Christmas? Don't folks feel the same way decorating a Christmas tree?

Could it be that the world's celebration of Christmas, beginning after Thanksgiving and proceeding to Christmas Day, is not, in fact, a misplaced observe of the Christmas season, but actually an incomplete observance of Advent? Are our complaints misplaced? Perhaps the world is trying to observe Advent (though inadequately, of course) through an anticipatory use of Christmas stuff and symbol, and what they really lack is the actual celebration of Christmas.

From Visitation to Pentecost Via Baptism

One of my favorite things about the church where I work is the depiction of the mysteries of the rosary in the windows. The Joyful Mysteries begin to the left of the sanctuary and progress to the back of the church. Then, on the other side, the Glorious Mysteries begin and proceed back to the sanctuary, so that the Coronation of Mary ends up opposite the Annunciation. The Sorrowful Mysteries appear as paintings on the ceiling, also proceeding to the sanctuary.

When the light is good, one can use the windows as meditations in praying the rosary in the same manner that one would make the Stations of the Cross.

Before Mass today, as my final preparation to preach on today's Gospel, I spent some time with the window of the Visitation:


Elizabeth's posture proclaims her words from St. Luke: how does this happen to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? Mary reaches out one hand in greeting, while the other is over her heart, where she kept all these things, reflecting on them. Poor Zechariah gestures in his muteness, and St. Joseph hangs back with his green halo. Anybody know why it's green?

One of my little dreams for the church is to tear up the awful carpeting and have the Luminous Mysteries put into the floor of the main aisle, opposite the Sorrowful Mysteries on the ceiling. It could be a nice mosaic or something. Because St. Anthony's altar and the old baptistery break up perfect evenness in the Joyful-Glorious layout, the Baptism of the Lord would end up in the floor right in between the Visitation pictured above and Pentecost:



Now this would be quite a lovely accident, because Jesus and John in the Baptism could parallel the postures of each other's mother in the Visitation window. John and Jesus would recapitulate their previous meeting in utero, except the other way around, accentuating the humility of the scene and the objection of John.

Then, the Holy Spirit that appears in the Baptism could parallel the radiant Dove in the Pentecost window. As you can see, I'm full of ideas on this fourth Sunday of Advent.

The Visitation

The disciples Mary and Elizabeth show us the path of divine charity. Follow this link for my homily for this weekend.

Mary and Joseph Arrive

It's the 17th of December and the great "O Antiphons" at Vespers begin our proximate preparation for the Lord's Nativity.

A Shepherd Appears

It's the third Sunday of Advent, and a shepherd appears, knowing something is up:

Baptized or Burned

We rejoice as our joyful hope nears fulfillment. The passionate love of God will be born among us. What will God's burning love be for us? Will it burn us away or baptize us into itself? Follow this link for my homily for this weekend.