Msgr. Beaulieu – Last Days of Advent

Last Days of Advent—Beginning Days of Christmastime

Even in the liturgical calendar, the season of Advent points ahead to Christmas because while the term Advent literally means arrival, it signifies the arrival of the Child Jesus. Being somewhat redundant, you could say that advent is genuinely  adventual — a time before, a looking forward — and it lacks meaning without Christmas. But maybe Christmas, in turn, lacks meaning without Advent.

All those daily readings from Isaiah, filled with visions of things yet to be, a constant barrage of the future tense: And it shall come to pass . . . And there shall come forth . . . A kind of longing pervades the Old Testament selections read in church over the weeks before Christmas — an anxious, almost sorrowful litany of hope is expressed, but only hope in what has not yet come. Zephaniah. Judges. Malachi. Numbers. Expressions such as I shall see him, but not now: I shall behold him, but not nigh: There shall come a star out of Jacob, and a scepter shall rise out of Israel.

So, Advent really is a discipline: a way of forming anticipation and channeling it toward its goal. There’s a flicker of rose on the third Sunday — Gaudete!, that day’s Mass begins: Rejoice! — but then it’s back to the dark purple that is the mark of the season in liturgical churches. And what those somber vestments symbolize is the deeply penitential design of Advent. Nothing we can do earns us the gift of Christmas, any more than Lent earns us Easter. But a season of contrition and sacrifice prepares us to understand and feel something about just how great the gift is when at last the day itself arrives.

More than any other holy day or holiday, Christmas seems to need its setting in the church year, for without it we have a diminishment of language, a diminishment of culture, and a diminishment of imagination. The Jesse trees and the Advent calendars, St. Martin’s Fast and St. Nicholas’ Feast, Gaudete Sunday, the childless crèches, the candle wreaths, the vigil of Christmas Eve: They give a shape to the anticipation of the season. They discipline the ideas and emotions that otherwise would shake themselves to pieces, like a flywheel wobbling wilder and wilder till it finally snaps off its axle. Advent, rightly kept, would prevent — the very thing, in fact, it is designed to halt — the secular version of Christmas. Through all the preparatory readings, through all the genealogical Jesse trees, the somber candles on the wreaths, the vigils, and the hymns, Advent keeps Christmas on Christmas Day: a fulfillment, a perfection, of what had gone before. I shall see him, but not now: I shall behold him, but not nigh.

Excerpted from http://www.catholiceducation.org. Joseph Bottum. “The End of Advent.” Originally published in First Things (December 2007).

The First Three Days of the Octave of Christmas

Even the oldest liturgical calendars have a series of saints’ feasts immediately following Christmas. In the Middle Ages, those first three days of the Octave of Christmas were considered to be a cortège of honor for the newborn King. They were called the Companions of Christ (Lat. Comites Christi). Those martyrs honored on those subsequent days, St. Stephen (December 26), St. John the Evangelist (December 27), and the Holy Innocents (December 28), help us to reflect not only on Who it is who has been born, but they also aid by incorporating the fullness of the Paschal Mystery. Those days recall not only the birth, but also the death and Resurrection of the Child Jesus and the persecution endured by the earliest Christians. Those three initial days represent the three forms of martyrdom. St. Stephen, the Protomartyr, was a martyr in desire and in act (voluntary and executed), St. John was a martyr in desire but not in act (voluntary and not executed), and the Holy Innocents were martyrs in act but not in desire (executed but not voluntary). “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.”