What Advent Offers the World

Advent has always been my favorite season of the Liturgical Year. From the unboxing of Advent/Christmas decorations, to the lighting of the candles on the Advent wreath at dinner, to the change in color and tone at Mass each Sunday, something about the build-up in anticipation of Christmas has always resonated with me.

Growing up in Wisconsin, Advent was inseparable from the dying of the old year, and marked by the onset of winter. At some point during Advent you got the first frost-covered morning, the first iced-over roads and ponds, and the first snowfall.

As the late autumn days got shorter, the darkness deepened, and daylight dwindled and became more precious. We all trudged back and forth to school swathed in hats, scarves, mittens, snow pants and heavy winter jackets, our breath making foggy clouds in the thin, cold air as we chatted and joked with our schoolmates.

And everywhere you looked the world had gone still and quiet, as though waiting with bated breath. The trees stood bare like tangled skeletons against the hazy white of a winter sky, or the deep velvet orange of a winter sunset. All the animals and birds slowed and quieted, conserving their energy for survival, with no energy to spare for frolicking or frivolous song. The stars at night presided over a deep, brooding stillness.

Advent seemed somehow to fit the stark, melancholy poetry of the deepening winter, the dormancy and hibernation, the death and cold darkness of the passing year. Everything seemed to testify to the truth that all things end, that time passes, that darkness can encroach on the light, and that life can oftentimes be bitter and hard, bitten by frigid winds, light, and warmth, and sustenance hard to come by.

Against the backdrop of the dying year, Advent seemed to be at once part of it, and yet simultaneously to transcend and even to transform it. This experience, this perspective, was unique to Catholics. We were the only ones doing Advent, everyone else just got winter.

While our non-Catholic neighbors were enduring the seemingly endless winter drudgery of snow-shoveling, high heating bills, and constant cold, we Catholics were carrying with us through all of it a great and rising hope. A bright, burning anticipation of something marvelous, glorious, splendid, and alive.

Although physically surrounded by the advancing gloom of winter like everybody else, spiritually we Advent Catholics sensed the coming of a new dawn, the approach of a light that would dispel and conquer the darkness. It was as the old carol says, “a thrill of hope, a weary world rejoices, for yonder breaks a new and glorious morn.” Only, we Catholics got to watch the darkness suffused slowly with the coming light.

Jesus, Light of Men, Light of the Nations, was, of course, already among us. The God-Man, incarnate of the Virgin Mary was, during the nine months of her pregnancy, truly Emmanuel, God with us. And for Catholics, in Advent, we were living in the great hope and promise of that astonishing fact. We did not wallow in despair, “til He appeared and the soul felt it’s worth,” we waited in hope. Our deliverer was coming, the Nativity of Our Lord and Savior was fast approaching. The darkness was less and less dark as the birth of the light approached.

It was this thrill, the thrill of watching the advance of spiritual darkness and death being halted, and then forced into retreat at His glorious approach, that I have always so loved about Advent. It is this same beautiful reality of the triumph of hope, the triumph of the light, the triumph of the truth, of the Incarnate Word of God, that I still love about Advent today.

So, what does Advent offer the world? Advent offers a compelling counter-narrative to the sad, cynical story repeated endlessly, hopelessly by a world gone mad with sin, a world lost in the night of its own blindness.

Advent offers hope to a culture of despair. Advent offers light to a world which has chosen to dwell in darkness. Advent offers meaning to a world struggling mightily to see the point of anything. Advent offers peace, real, lasting peace, peace the world cannot give, to a world which is never at peace, but constantly at war – with reality, with truth, with goodness, with itself. Advent offers a chance to see again the beauty and power of childhood and innocence, to a world that scoffs at such ideas, to its own detriment and devastation. Advent offers the promise of salvation to a world which alternately thinks that it doesn’t need salvation, or that it is now beyond saving.

Advent also offers each of us a reminder that we have been entrusted with a role in a great drama, so much bigger, deeper, richer, and more real than the shabby secular melodrama of self-definition, self-fulfillment, and self-centeredness.

And we Catholics, if we live Advent well, if we live it joyfully, and full of hope, provide a vitally important counter-witness to the so-called “wisdom” of the world.

We see the darkness, of course, but we don’t fear it - it cannot overcome the light of hope that the coming of Christ ignites within us. We are not haunted by the worry that the darkness might be permanent, that it might be victorious this time, that perhaps the light will finally be extinguished and banished forever.

We know better, we know how this story turns out, and not least because it turns and returns every year, as the Church dons the purple robes of royalty and awaits with hopeful hearts the birth of Christ the King.

Bearing all that in mind, let us live a joyful, faithful, hopeful, Advent and Christmas season – this year, and every year – so that those bereft of hope, those now looking for a better story than the hollow falsehood of what the world promised them, can see the rising light of Christ in us. So that they, too, can follow His star, and find the newborn baby King who has saved them.

God bless you and your families throughout this new Church year!

In Christ,

Steve