Advent Again

Tonight, I will be going over to the local University parish to help with Advent confessions. It will be the first of several such confession evenings in various parishes in the next couple of weeks. Definitely, the serious side of Advent.

This is a supremely festive, celebratory time of the year. But Advent is also intended to be taken seriously as a quasi-penitiential time. Indeed, this season of autumn turning into winter gives this holiday time a distinctive feel, a somewhat solemn and reflective mood, which the Church’s annual cycle tries to capture in its observance of Advent.

Advent originated as an annual period of repentance focused on preparation for Judgment Day. It has even been suggested that the liturgical hymn Dies Irae, that magnificent masterpiece which was for so many centuries sung at funeral Masses, may perhaps have been originally composed for use in Advent - its somber sentiments intended to concentrate our attention of Christ's final coming at the end of time as judge of all the world.

In any case, Advent continues the end-time, Judgment Day themes of the preceding several Sundays, summing them all up in the warning. Like the servants in the Gospels, we have been left with work to do, while we wait for the Lord’s return.

We will do that waiting - in what we might call “liturgical time” - by looking back, to get to the future. I sometimes think of Advent as an ecclesiastical version of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, which ends with Santa Claus, thus formally introducing us to Christmas. Thus, the 4th Sunday of Advent will recall Jesus’ conception in his Virgin Mother’s body. The 2nd and 3rd Sundays, however, will recall the adult Christ’s public appearance on the historical stage as announced by John the Baptist, challenging us to recognize Jesus, here and now, in the present time, between Christmas and the end. Finally (but at Advent's beginning), the 1st Sunday puts past and present in perspective, focusing on Christ’s final coming, when (as we say in the Creed) he will come to judge the living and the dead.

Hence the somber tone. What we see and observe are autumn’s withered leaves, winter’s barren branches, and the end of another year. What we feel and fear is the end of ourselves. As the prophet Isaiah laments, we have all withered like leaves, and our guilt carries us away like the wind.

Yet, while Advent starts out being about fear, it is also about faith and hope – both the passing of an old year and our hopes for the new, both the ever enveloping winter darkness of a dying natural world and the dawning brightness of Christ’s coming to save us. As Saint Paul assures us, God is faithful, and by him you were called to fellowship with his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.

In the true spirit of winter – winter as it used to be experienced when people actually lived according to the rhythm of the seasons – Advent challenges us to slow down and take stock, to pay attention. Of course, everything about the way we live nowadays militates against slowing down – let alone taking stock of ourselves and paying attention to anything. If anything, in our work-obsessed society we all brag about being so busy.

The older I get, the more I think I begin to appreciate how much sense Advent makes. The older one gets, the more aware one becomes that time is running out, and thus the more one appreciates the importance of the present.

Time – this time, our time – is so precious, precisely because it is limited, but also because it has a future. Advent annually ritualizes for us our ongoing present reality, where we actually are right now, living and waiting between Christ’s 1st coming at Christmas and his final coming for which we say – as we pray every day at Mass – we wait in joyful hope.

Advent is not, therefore, some irrelevant interlude on the way to Christmas. Much less is it some artificial exercise in make-believe, created by ecclesiastical kill-joys to compete (as if one could complete) with the joyful Christmas season being celebrated all around us. In any case, the liturgy isn’t a play. We’re not reenacting God’s entry into our world a long time ago, or pretending Jesus hasn’t already been born, so that we will be somehow surprised on Christmas morning - as if Jesus were Santa Claus.

The point of Advent is to let the anniversary of Christ’s 1st coming concentrate our attention on his coming again, while we, meanwhile, recognize his action on our behalf in the present. The challenge of Advent is to let our anxious and fear–filled present be transformed into that hopeful future promised by Christ’s coming in the past.

Advent is a wake-up call to respond to Christ’s coming and so live as people for whom the Christmas story really matters enough, to make everything different from what would otherwise be in a world without the presence of its Savior, Jesus Christ, Emmanuel, "God with us."

Between Christmas and the End

Lo! He comes with clouds descending.
Once for favored sinners slain;
Thousand thousand saints attending,
Swell the triumph of His train:
Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!
God appears on earth to reign.

So begins Charles Wesley’s well known and popular Advent hymn. As Wesley’s words make clear, this season we call “Advent” is about the Lord’s coming. Wesley’s 2nd verse (based on Revelation 1:7) highlights people’s reactions to his coming:

Every eye shall now behold Him
Robes in dreadful majesty;
Those who set at naught and sold Him,
Pierced and nailed Him to a tree,
Deeply wailing, deeply wailing, deeply wailing,
Shall the true Messiah see.

Every Advent, we remember Christ’s 1st coming, which we commemorate at Christmas. That 1st coming challenges us to recognize and respond to Christ’s presence and action among us here and now, which in turn prepares us for Christ’s promised return. Christ has come; Christ is coming; Christ will come. Christ yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

Ostensibly the most future-oriented of seasons, Advent us actually a sort of symbol for the entire Christian life, lived (as it inevitably must be) in the present – between the 1st coming of Christ and his hoped-for final advent. As Christians, we live our lives literally in this interval between Christmas and the end. And that is what Advent is all about.

Jesus’ warning words to his disciples in the Gospel (Matthew 24:37-44) and Paul’s parallel challenge to the Christians in Rome (Romans 13:11-14) reflect this fundamental fact. Their point was not when Jesus will come but being prepared for his coming – not as something to be put off to some far away future, but as our proper preoccupation, here and now, in the present. The future will indeed come – at its own time and on its own terms – but our task is the present, which is what in fact will determine who we will be in the future.

Now this liturgical Advent, as we actually experience it in the present, relies heavily in the seasonal experience of darkness what so defines this time of year in our northern hemisphere. Advent wreaths and candlelight all attempt to tap into that natural imagery, at the risk almost of making Advent some sort of folkloric, seasonal pageant. The Christian life, however, is not a play. The world was really in darkness before the coming of Christ. At his final coming, darkness will be destroyed. Meanwhile, in the interim in which we live – between Christmas and the end – darkness and light coexist in constant conflict.

We are all familiar with Jesus’ famous image of his disciples as the light of the world, a city set on a mountain. Modern electricity has made darkness a mere inconvenience for us. Today, one can illuminate an entire city with a single switch. (It takes a lot more than that, of course, but that’s the part we see and so is how we think about it). To light a fire, however, and then to illuminate a city by spreading that fire’s light from street to street and house to house, that takes work. That work is the mission of the Church in every generation – to let the light of Christ shine forth from and through his Church and so truly to illuminate our world.

Unlike natural darkness, however, the world’s alienation from God is not some abstract natural force. Aren’t we – the men and women of the world, the ones whose actions have contributed (and continue to contribute) so much to the world’s darkness? For this reason, Advent has traditionally been a penitential season. Pope Innocent III even prescribed black as the liturgical color for Advent – although purple successfully beat black to become the season’s official color. Conveniently, purple simultaneously suggests both royalty (Christ the king coming in glory) and repentance.

But what is the penance appropriate to Advent? St. Paul tells us to throw off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light. So, I need to be asking myself, exactly what is it that keeps me in darkness? Why isn’t the light of Christ shining forth from me –and through me – to light up the entire world around me? Paul’s words challenge us to pay attention to what is happening right now. Living as we all do in a culture of institutionalized irresponsibility, Advent’s message is a radical wake-up call to face up to our responsibility to mean what we say – really to throw off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.

Most of us aren’t very good at waiting. We want to know as much as possible in advance, so we can rush into the future. The good news of the Gospel, however, is that is precisely the present that matters. Jesus’ warning about the days of Noah reminds us how common, how universal, our present experience really is. We are still eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage – just as it was up to the day that Noah entered the ark. The fact that the present time is limited just makes it all the more precious, makes it matter that much more. So, stay awake, Jesus warns, be prepared – now – because what I do now, the way I live now, the kind of person I am becoming here and now, that is the kind of person I will be when the Lord comes, and so the person I am going to remain for all eternity.

Whatever surprises any of us may be hoping to fund under the Christmas Tree this year, the coming of Christ is not one of them. Christ has already come. If he hadn’t, the world would not be celebrating Christmas and none of us would be here at Mass today! The issue is whether his presence in our world today matters enough to make a difference in the way we live and what we care about – whether and how we are making the most of our limited but precious time to become now what we hope to be when he comes again.

Homily at Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN., November 28, 2010

Advent

A common, pre-Christmas custom is the "Advent Calendar," a 19th century German cusotm especially popular with children. Advent calendars count the days to Christmas. As each dat eis uncovered, a picture or "treat" is revealed. Somewhere I still have an old Advent Calendar given to me more than half a century ago.

As a liturgical season, the Church’s Advent, which begins tonight, is part of the Church’s larger, annual cycle (the “Liturgical Year”), within which we commemorate the mysteries of Christ’s life from his incarnation to his ascension, celebrate his continued presence in the Church through his gift of the Holy Spirit, and express our joyful hope for his coming again. The commemoration of Christ’s incarnation, birth, and revelation to the world is the focus of the Christmas-Epiphany season now beginning. These four preliminary weeks of Advent are intended as a time when the remembrance of the world’s waiting for Christ’s 1st coming at Christmas focuses our attention on his 2nd and final coming “to judge the living and the dead,” while meanwhile directing our awareness of his presence in the present. The “great lesson of Advent,” Evelyn Underhill once wrote, “is the many-side truth of God’s perpetual coming to His creatures in secret and humble ways; the nearness of his saving care and energizing grace.”

Here in the northern hemisphere, Advent corresponds to the period of the winter solstice, the darkest time of the year, when the days are the shortest and the nights the longest. The now widely popular custom of the Advent Wreath may have originated in the old northern European winter practice of decorating a wagon wheel (not in use during the winter pause) with evergreen branches and lighted candles. In its present form, the four candles represent the four weeks of Advent. As the solstice approaches, an additional candle is lit each week, counteracting the increasing earthly darkness with the growing brightness that symbolizes the coming of Christ, the light of the world.

In recent decades, Advent has been increasingly eclipsed by secular society’s celebration of Christmas. Just as the Church spreads out its celebration of Christmas across Advent and Epiphany-time, so too our society spreads out the Christmas season starting in early November (or even October). Some seem to want to lament this, as if Advent and Christmas were in some kind of competition (a competition in which Advent can obviously only be the loser).

The plain fact, however, is we are participants in both of these cycles. If we completely neglect the Church’s calendar, the Church’s way of celebrating the Incarnation, then we risk missing the whole point of Christmas, failing (as the old saying goes) to see the forest for the trees. But, if we ignore – or, rather, pretend to ignore – the Christmas season as it is actually being experienced by most people in our world, then we also miss the point, because we ignore the world Christ has come into, which is, after all, the point of the Incarnation. God did not become human just for himself, but for us – propter nos hominess et propter nostram salutem descendit de coelis (“for us men and for our salvation he came down from heaven”).

Rather than helplessly lamenting (and scolding) the world we live in, I believe we can best appreciate Advent as an opportunity to enrich our contemporary celebration of Christmas, without negating the joy and festivity (and gift-giving) that make this such a special time of year. After all, at no other season does the busy, secular world seem so open to the Good News that is the Church’s story. Thus, Advent can be an opportunity for enriching all the joy and festivity around us with that sense of explicit longing for God’s kingdom which Advent highlights so well, and which is supposed to be what Christian life is about all the time in this interval between the first Christmas and the end.

Airport Travel and its Discontents

All this week, while I was in California for Thanksgiving (complete with freezing temperatures to accompany a week long festa of pasta, prosciutto, and provolone and other good things), I have repeatedly been asked by people about my experience of security at the airport. At Knoxville’s small, user-friendly airport, there was (not surprisingly) nothing out of the ordinary. Returning home Friday from San Francisco International Airport, on the other hand, I would not have been surprised to have had to go through the newest body scanning machines, etc. In fact, the only thing outstanding about my experience leaving from SFO was the enormous crowd – more than one might have expected on the day between the holiday and the weekend.

Judging from the news coverage (or, rather, hype), this latest development in airport security screening is, to put it mildly, controversial. On this, as on almost all other subjects of controversy, there is certainly plenty of room for legitimate differences of opinion and appropriate debate. Are these particular procedures really the best ones available to meet our security needs? Is this particular equipment really as safe as is being claimed? Have the screeners really been adequately trained to deal with people in an appropriately respectful manner? Etc. On all these matters, there is obviously room for debate. And, indeed, in a free society there should be debate. But, of course, what we have been hearing on this subject recently is hardly debate at all, but more of the same polemics that have poisoned our political culture and are tearing apart our social fabric.

To me, what we are hearing these days about this latest development in airport security screening seems to be just more of the same sad approach to our public life that has become the norm especially in the past decade or so – and shows no sign of diminishing. Americans want to be safe and secure in the air. Indeed, some seem to hold society somehow responsible if they are not – at least in the sense that they feel entitled to compensation from the state if they are victims of terrorism. At the same time, however, they don’t want to have to endure the slightest inconvenience, let alone anything resembling so old-fashioned a concept as “shared sacrifice.”

We see this, of course, not just in regard to the momentary controversy du jour of airport security. Rather, we run into it across the board in almost all aspects of our national life. Recall the immediately dismissive response from the ideological Left to some initial proposals floated by President Obama’s bipartisan deficit-reduction commission. Does anyone really doubt that entitlements will have to be curbed eventually if we are to get the deficit under control? The Right speaks eloquently about the crime of generational theft that the deficit really represents, but who on the Right is any more ready to bite the bullet on Medicare? And forget about tax increases! Again, what intelligent person really cannot understand that revenue must be increased to control the deficit? As a society, we are increasingly like those Californians, who (as one commentator has pithily put it) want to subsidize themselves like socialists, while taxing themselves like libertarians.

Is there no end to this nonsensical substitute for intelligent political discourse?

The solution certainly is not rallying for sanity or any other such self-righteous conversation among yet another niche group listening to itself in its own self-constructed cable-TV echo chamber. If anything, the solution likely lies with those who do not watch cable-TV news (or listen to talk-radio). People who do not watch cable-TV news, who do not nourish their prejudices on the ideological posturing promoted by MSNBC or FOX, are in fact the majority of Americans. Theoretically, in a well functioning democratic republic, it ought to be possible for the majority of Americans to influence our national “debate” and take it in a different direction.

There are, admittedly, structural dimensions to the way American politics is set up that may hinder such an outcome. The bigger problem, however, is that perennial problem of intensity. Some people perhaps disdain cable-TV news and talk-radio because they find its polemics unattractive. Most people, however, do not listen to cable-TV news or talk-radio primarily because they are less interested in politics than those who do. They are also less likely to be registered members of political parties and vote in party primaries. Indeed, they are less likely even to vote at all. Meanwhile, those who care the most intensely about politics are, not surprisingly, the most ideological and the most partisan. In the narrow world of political activism, they are the ones who matter most and set the tone.

Since most people are not avid consumers of political news, the need for effective filters to help people make sense of public policy issues is evident. Historically in the US, this essential filtering function was performed at election time by political parties – and performed fairly well. The gradual transformation of our political parties from broadly based, social coalitions into narrowly based, ideological interest groups has correspondingly altered the content of that filtering process. Meanwhile and more significantly, the diminished role of political parties in the nominating process, the greater openness of the process to more narrowly ideological candidates empowered by access to the media (and the money which enables independent candidates to get access to the media) has created alternative filters, more powerful in many cases than political parties. The result is that even those who are not enough interested in politics to pay a lot of attention to cable-TV news and talk radio are likely to be directly or indirectly influenced by those sources when they are processing information to form opinions and/or to vote in elections.

Meanwhile, we wait in vain for someone (our President, perhaps) to explain to us that Americans might actually have to accept some level of disruption and inconvenience if we want to fly safely.

Eating Together

The Thanksgiving holiday is not exactly about eating, but it is incomprehensible without eating – and not just any eating, but eating together. According to the Pew Research Center’s most recent study (The Decline of Marriage and Rise of New Families, p. 53), the typical host this Thanksgiving “will be setting places for 12 family members.” (My California family’s Thanksgiving dinner will be just half that. On the other hand, my New York relatives’ holiday dinner together will be at least double the average.) For most of human history, most meals (and not just “holiday” meals) were, when possible, eaten with others. And for most people, throughout most of human history, the ordinary shared meal was most often a family meal. At Thanksgiving, people (myself included) travel thousands of miles not to eat turkey, but to eat turkey with others – typically family members or others with whom one is comparably close.

The contemporary popularity of restaurants and of eating out (to the extent that it is a real meal and not just food eaten quickly, impersonally, and alone) may well reflect not just the obvious convenience of not having to cook for oneself but also may reflect a recognition of a real desire to commune with others over food. Those who resist the fashionable temptation to eat at their desks and actually take time for a real lunch hour with colleagues or friends may be expressing as much about their need and desire for human community as they are about how they prefer best to meet their nutritional needs.

Of course, there are all sorts of factors which get in the way of the classic common meal. Economic necessity forces many people to work too many hours. Many more work too many hours because that may lead to their feeling more validated in certain – particularly professional - circles. Families find themselves prisoners of individual members’ conflicting schedules. All these extrinsic factors impinge upon community (even religious communities), breaking bonds which might otherwise be stronger. Sometimes, competing schedules are less a consequence of economic necessity than they are a product of our greater individual freedom. Given the pervasive power and appeal of individual liberty today, I suspect that the only kind of human community that can seriously survive the assaults of our fixation on individual freedom is one which accepts and respects individual freedom and can negotiate new communal relationships and rituals. Herein lies perhaps the great practical challenge for the future of the common meal – that of transforming its present predicament of being in competition with our individual freedom (symbolized by our separate schedules) into a positive reinforcement of human freedom by furthering its fulfillment in relationships. If the common meal as an obligation is a thing of the past, shared meals as opportunities for genuine mutuality may be increasingly necessary.

In the life of Jesus, shared meals played a visibly important part in his ministry. Jesus’ practice of eating with all sorts of people, particularly with those he might otherwise not be expected to eat with, was widely recognized as a genuine sign of something new. A new kind of connectedness was created among people who, in that society certainly, would probably never have otherwise socialized together. Not just at Thanksgiving, but always, those committed to continue Christ’s work of healing and reconciliation would do well to keep in mind the memory of those early Christians who shared meals together “with glad and generous hearts” (Acts 2:46 NRSV).