Advent: The Coming of Love

Day One

Why Advent? What’s the point?

I have been asked that more than once, particularly by my Evangelical friends: why do Catholics and others, put so much stock in “ritualistic” sorts of things not explicitly spelled out in scripture – things like Advent, and its trappings – the purple vestments, the Advent wreaths and such. “Jesus came once for all, he doesn’t keep coming,” one woman said. “Christmas is a wonderful season. Why do you need a whole Advent season, too? What’s the point?”

My response was to remind her where I had been a year earlier – at the deathbed of a beloved brother – and where I was a year later, and where I would be a year after that. “Christ is constant,” I said, “but our lives are not. We can get so caught up in things, in working, paying bills, making deadlines, tending to our families…”

Speaking for myself, without the Advent season, I might not manage to set aside a few minutes each day to reflect on the tangled trails I have traveled in the passing year, and to realize just how far into wilderness I have strayed. Especially in an election year, it seems, one can wander pretty deeply into the weeds, and the world, beautiful as it is, is also full of abyssmal holes, and tricky nettles and the thickets, which make us feel entrapped, even if we are not.

Advent coaxes us out. We look up and there is a darker sky than before. The stars show more clearly, and they inspire us to hack through the stuff that has begun to imprison us within the year so that we may walk a freer path, made clear. Engaged and with a certain goal, our awareness shifts and becomes heightened. We hear a memory: “All things, all senses, all times, all places are alive in the sight of their King.” And the King makes everything new.

Without Advent – without the putting up of purple in the midst of all the red and green in the tiring rush between Thanksgiving and the New Year – we might forget to mark this time, make straight this path, and ponder what transpired in a lonely cave in Bethlehem, 2000 years ago; what it meant then, and what it still means for all of us, today.

Because it is monumental, this Coming – it is the Coming of Love in a way never before (or since) encountered.

And yes, it has “already happened.” But if God is outside of Time, and we know He is, then that momentous event “is happening” right now.

A star is shining brightly.

A people are moving towards the places from whence they came.

A young woman is great with child.

Wise men are lifting their eyes to heaven, and wondering.

The place of our own origin, from whence we came, beckons and sends a flare, and One who is All in All will come – in love, and breathtaking humility – to show us the way back to the Creator.

We are great with expectation.

We raise our heads from the wilderness of our lives, and look about, and wonder. And hope.

And when I pray, each day, “come, Lord Jesus” I pray for this Coming of Love, I pray for that moment when heaven reaches down in song and succor and cradles earth, albeit in the guise of One needing a cradle – or a manger – Himself.

Come, Lord Jesus. Come, again.

Come, still.

Come, everyday, to needy, weak and helpless me.

Advent is the Coming. The season helps us to make ourselves ready; make straight the paths in the wilderness of our fickle, changeable, distracted, all-too-human hearts.

Gerard Vanderleun muses Advent-wise (and wisely) with On Advent: “We Are All Lying in the Mud, but Some of Us Are Looking at the Stars”. Lovely.

Rocco at Whispers in the Loggia gives a tantalizing excerpt to this extraordinary Homily for today (by Msgr. James P. Moroney, out of Boston) and links also to many more valuable sites and readings.

Deacon Greg links to something fun, as well.

Mark D. Roberts has an Introduction to Advent

In anticipation of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception – a feast which I once tried to explain a bit, here – Julie at Happy Catholic has begun a novena. I love novenas. So powerful.

Jimmy Akin, the debate on the purple. I am fine with Advent purple anticipating a King. I always thought that was what it meant, although I know there used to be a penitential thought behind it as well.

St. Vincent’s Archabbey meditates.

The History of Advent and more here.