Getting Advent right

Advent begins December 1st this year, making it almost the shortest Advent one can have.

If I had to offer one piece of advice to Catholics, it’s getting Advent right. Advent is a time of preparation, not a time of anticipation.

By “anticipation” I mean the kind of acceleration of a solemnity or feast. The reason the hours of Saturday evening/night “count” for fulfilling the Dominical precept of participating in Mass is because bishops have said they do (i.e., a canonical fiat).  I have pointed out elsewhere that the sometimes heard claim that “Saturday evening Masses” reflect our Jewish heritage by honoring the day as beginning as sunset is a canard, largely concocted post-factum to justify the practice. That is why Saturday evening Masses are not “vigil” Masses for Sunday but “anticipated” Masses.

It’s that concept of “anticipation” that I want to get at regarding Advent.

“Anticipation” essentially means “celebrating now”. Saturday evening Masses anticipating Sunday celebrate Sunday now, at 5 pm Saturdays (the generally most popular hour).

And that is how America at-large celebrates Christmas. December is largely one big “anticipation” of “the holiday” (because, paradoxically, what we celebrate is a name not to be spoken). “Christmas/holiday” parties anticipate festivities.

The problem with the “anticipation” approach is that December 25–Christmas–ends the holiday rather than begins it. All the important “holiday stuff” is stuffed into the first 24 days of December. Even “Christmas movies” (except on the Hallmark Channel) peter off during the week between Christmas and New Year. And whatever “holiday” spirit might still be coasting on celebratory gases can count on extinguishment by about 4 am January 1.

This is not the Catholic approach to Christmas.

For Catholics, December 25 is the start of the season, not the end of it. Advent is not supposed to be miniature Christmases but preparation for Christmas. Those are two distinct things although, culturally, the latter has largely been lost in America.

It’s why, every year, I rail against people buying Christmas trees early and then throwing them out early. One of the apartments in my building has had a Christmas tree in its window since November 8. And, as I said, Christmas tree divestiture can begin as early as December 26 and almost certainly in the first few days of January. Some communities even set their Christmas tree pickups before January 6. Against that backdrop, I’m at the opposite extreme, clinging to the old tradition of keeping the tree up until Candlemas, February 2.

But it’s not really about trees. Celebrating without preparation is stunted. It loses half its meaning. Think back to your youth when you went out on a date. Half the pleasure was in getting ready for the “big event.”

We don’t get ready anymore. We just “show up.” We think we do the other a favor by our mere presence. In Polish, we have a saying for those whose excuse is to be slothful: “tak mnie stworzyłeś, Panie; tak mnie masz!” (“that’s how you made me, Lord; that’s what you’ve got!”).

The purpose of Advent is to “get ready.” The four weeks of Advent symbolically point to God getting mankind ready through the Old Testament for the advent of His Son. The fact that humans had to “get ready” meant there were things that stood in the way of that readiness.

I am often asked each year whether Advent is a “penitential” season. It used to be, the vestige of that fact being the continued use of violet vestments in Advent. Good theology recognizes the penitential motif of the season: God sent His Son into the world. That’s a big deal. That’s something we ought to get ready for.

It’s an even bigger deal when we recognize that God sent His Son not because He had nothing to do about two thousand years ago or had a particular penchant for a trip to Israel. Our tradition and creed tells us “for us men and for our salvation He came down from heaven,” which means we otherwise could not have been saved. That makes the imperative for preparation even more exigent.

Canonically, though, Advent is currently not a “penitential season.” Canon 1250 says that the “penitential days and times in the universal Church are every Friday of the whole year and the season of Lent.” The first half of that canon is de facto a dead letter in the United States and probably most of the Western world. Which leaves Lent.

I favor changing Canon 1250 to read “the seasons of Advent and Lent.” Shorn of its penitential character, Advent becomes an anticipation of Christmas, inverting the flow of time so that Christmas ends rather than begins with the feast itself. Devoid of a penitential aspect of personal, spiritual preparation, the raison d’être of Christmas itself is lost. Instead of being the launch of a celebration of our salvation, “cultural Christmas” turns into a time of sentiment, travel, and consumerism. It retains a family theme, which is good, but that theme often erases “the reason for the season.” That families get together for Christmas is a good thing; that Christmas becomes primarily an annual family reunion is something else. And, of course, the “funnel-effect” of anticipating Christmas throughout Advent—spreading out the feast so that December 25 is practically is denouement—reinforces the myth that Christmas is just a sacralization of the winter solstice, a celebration of the “end of the year” and the start of longer days with some holy water sprinkled on.

That’s why it’s vital we let Advent be Advent and not let it become an anticipated Christmas.

Building up to the feast on December 25 then leaves energy for the feast to continue, as it does liturgically through an octave (the only one of two octaves – along with Easter – in the Church calendar). But that would also require us to appreciate the feasts that sustain the “Christmas spirit” and we’re not good at that.

January 1 suffers something of an identity crisis. The world calls it “New Year’s Day” but the Church doesn’t. The Church calls it “Mary, Mother of God” but even many Catholics don’t get the connection. Meanwhile, the Gospel speaks of Jesus’ circumcision, which some moderns lacking an understanding of Judaism or circumcision’s significance to Judaism, might think is a little weird. And, of course, even though it’s a civil holiday and day off, the U.S. bishops’ “Saturday-or-Monday-holyday-get-out-of-church-free” card further undermines celebration.

Epiphany, which, for most of the world, was a “little Christmas” that practically closed out the “Twelve Days of Christmas” has been shifted to a Sunday. It is lost as a distinct feast, subsumed and practically observed by most Catholics as “just another boring Sunday” prior to a manic Monday. Doubt it? Take a survey: I’d bet more people—even Catholics—will associate “January 6” with “insurrection” over “Three Kings”.

We’ll then wedge the “Baptism of the Lord” into Christmastide (as if Jesus got circumcised and baptized!) without really explaining why Jesus’s Baptism is only analogically what we understand the Sacrament of Baptism to be.

For the liturgists, then, Christmastide is goodbye. For Americans, whatever last fumes of Christmas might still be around are exhausted by Martin Luther King’s birthday: if you haven’t fully gotten back-to-work-as-normal by January 2, you’d better be by then.

The absence in the United States of the European practice of “carnival”–a period of festivity between Christmas and Ash Wednesday—also skews the Christmas season. If Christmas ends rather than begins Christmastime, the Church’s subsequent Christmastide feasts in practice are in practice anemic in terms of perpetuating the sense of the season, then Ordinary Time in January and February really becomes “nondescript time” and calendar filler. Carnival sustained the Christmas spirit of celebration by prolonging it through the start of Lent, filling dark winter nights with joy and providing a sense of celebratory joy after the penitential preparations of Advent and before those of Lent.

But if nothing is prepared for and celebration is compressed into a day or a day-and-a-half (Christmas Eve plus Christmas Day), the rest of liturgical Christmastime and the Time after Epiphany runs the risk of (as, arguably in practice it has) simply nondescript time, another succession of days substantially no different (though a bit darker) than, say a comparable calendar interval in October and November.

Does anybody wonder, then, why the liturgical calendar is practically so marginal to the average Catholic?

Grace presupposes nature, but when you separate the two, “grace”—in terms of the Church calendar—becomes a theory abstracted from the practical ennui of quotidian, mundane life. Marking time means understanding its meaning, which means knowing when to celebrate but also when to prepare for the celebration. Ecclesiastes captured this when he spoke of “a time to mourn and a time to dance” (3:4). But unless you differentiate those two times, you wind up with one amalgam that’s just a time to muddle through.