We live in a culture of instant gratification where most anything we want is just one click away. Advent invites us to slow down and savor the season of expectation, longing, and hope.
Advent, which begins December 1, is four weeks of preparing ourselves spiritually in expectation of the birth of God made flesh in Jesus at Christmas. At least it’s supposed to be.
If you haven’t noticed, we’re now caught up in a world where we can click here, add to cart now, and get same-day delivery. Who has time to wait? And, if you live in a large enough metropolitan area, there’s sure to be at least one radio station that’s been playing nothing but Christmas songs since before Thanksgiving.
OK, so the odds may seem stacked against you. But things weren’t looking so good for Moses and the Israelites at the Red Sea, or Daniel in the lion’s den, and they turned out all right. Putting on the brakes and shunting aside the energy of the cultural clash is tame by comparison.
Advent Traditions
“My own sense, my own practice of Advent has changed and deepened over time,” says Mary Beth Newkumet, a columnist in the Catholic press who writes for Magnificat magazine and has become a grandmother. “When [my children] were smaller, I focused on some of the outward things: the Advent wreath; we’d celebrate the feast of St. Nicholas (December 6); we’d celebrate Santa Lucía (December 13). We link it to the liturgical year and some of those beautiful customs of the Church. They are now doing that with their own kids, which I find very beautiful.”
On one hand, Newkumet asks: “Who wouldn’t want more Christmas? The lights and the excitement and the anticipation of the feast. I get why the culture does that, right? At the same time, I’m at a place where I’m really looking for the Incarnation. I’m looking for Christ. I find myself longing for more depth and more of a sense of sensibility and more encounters with the living Jesus with the Incarnation.”
Distractions are hardly limited to Advent, but “Advent is more difficult, because you have more of the holiday and Christmas things going on, and it’s all around you everywhere you look,” says Beth Dotson Brown, a Catholic novelist who also directs the mentor program at Partners for Rural Impact in eastern Kentucky.
“Here’s an example of how crazy our culture is. I went to the dollar store the other day. And they have plastic pumpkins for Halloween. It’s July! And when that’s over, you’ll have Thanksgiving and Christmas things,” Dotson Brown says.
She finds support in a prayer group that she’s been part of for more than 30 years. The women met on a Cursillo weekend. “We try to keep one another focused on the seasons that we’re in, and, outside of that season, to remember what could be distracting us,” says Dotson Brown. “We’re enriching our use of our time and/or attention. It’s important to have someone to share the struggles with—and the rewards with.”
Dotson Brown recalls a family tradition she associates with Advent. “My grandmother learned many years ago how to make a good old-fashioned gingerbread house, the kind you glue together with sugar-water icing. It sits throughout the whole season, which is symbolic of Advent. You make it yourself. And as a kid you want to eat it, ’cause it tastes good. But it joins you in waiting through the Advent season. And in our family, we’d break it on New Year’s Day.”
“Sometimes it’s good not to have immediate gratification,” she continues.
A Season of Longing
It may help to know Advent’s liturgical underpinnings.
The season is all about “expectation, longing, hope,” says Rita Thiron, executive director of the Federation of Diocesan Liturgical Commissions. The Universal Norms on the Liturgical Year and the Calendar puts it this way: “Advent has a twofold character, for it is a time of preparation for the Solemnities of Christmas, in which the first coming of the Son of God to humanity is remembered, and likewise a time when, by remembrance of this, minds and hearts are led to look forward to Christ’s second coming at the end of time.”
The liturgical calendar didn’t suddenly pop up one day. “We begin to see Christmas in the late fourth century,” Thiron says. “In turn, we begin to see preparation for Christmas—Advent—in the decades following.”
She quoted the late Jesuit Father Robert Taft, a liturgical scholar, who said, “The First Sunday of Advent is not just the first day of the liturgical year. It is its seam,” connecting the previous liturgical year with the new one.
In November, there’s “the remembering the dead, the end-time, and we must be prepared because we don’t know what’s coming [or] when Jesus will be coming,” Thiron explains. “The First Sunday of Advent, we hear John the Baptist saying the same darn thing: Be prepared! It’s prayed, year after year after year after year. The end-time, yes, but hope.”
Yet schools—even Catholic schools—have Christmas concerts before Christmas Day. “Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, we’re celebrating, we’re shopping, we’re decorating, and that’s not a terrible thing. However, it does rob us of the anticipation that Advent gives us and the expectation that Advent gives us, and hope to prepare our hearts and our homes for such a gorgeous feast as the Nativity of the Lord,” Thiron says. “And then we can pull out all the stops and celebrate for 12 days until the Baptism of the Lord. You can’t talk about Advent without talking Christmas.”
How to Make the Most of Advent
Mary Jo Paquin and her husband, Del, raised eight children in Whitmore Lake, Michigan, an hour outside Detroit. Now she’s raising 22 chickens and two ducks.
“When our family was young, we were very intentional about Advent and making sure Christmas was about Jesus’ birthday,” Paquin says. “When the kids were little—[as] Catholic homeschool moms—you celebrate Advent, no Christmas songs until Christmas.”
When their older children got into high school and more exposed to the culture, the family “softened” its approach to Advent but clung to the traditions that mattered most.
“Oh, it’s OK,” she recalls saying. “We’re still holding on to the important things. We bless our Advent wreath. We have our prayers together. We have our meals together as a family group and keep our focus on what the season is for. If the culture is rushing ahead, let’s try to grab onto the good things.”
Spiritual directors offered advice on how to be more observant during Advent.
“Usually I recommend that they understand how the Lord would like them to prepare for Christmas this year, because every year is different and every year they’re in a different space,” says Father Bill Neubecker, a priest of the Oblates of the Virgin Mary who has been a spiritual director for more than 40 years, including 29 in Brazil. The question he asks of those who come to him, he adds, is, “How do they sense that they need to prepare, or how do they sense that the Lord is inviting them to prepare for Christmas?”
In Brazil, according to Father Neubecker, preparation during Advent is traditionally done with a novena. “It’s sort of like Advent at home. Everybody who’s doing the novena, they have a holy picture on their front door so that people know that they’re doing their preparation for Christmas. And usually they [invite] their neighbors and their other family members to participate.”
Thinking about booking a flight to Rio de Janeiro or São Paulo to spend Advent? Don’t bother.
“When I first went to Brazil, they had a different culture, and 80 percent lived in the rural areas,” Father Neubecker recalls. “And then when I left Brazil, it was just the opposite: 80 percent lived in urban areas. That means a whole change of culture, lifestyle. That means a lot of the modern, secular values are mixed in with Advent now.”
Still, Father Neubecker draws on the traditions he experienced in Brazil in his ministry in the States. “I invite them to do the daily Mass reading, the novenas in the back of the church,” he notes.
‘Doing Hopeful Things’
Nancy Small, associate director for spiritual direction initiatives at the Jesuits’ Office of Ignatian Spirituality, completed her spiritual director training in 1994.
“Advent is a great season that invites contemplation. It invites us to take a sacred pause and really steep ourselves in the hope of the season,” Small says. She finds inspiration in the readings from Isaiah, which describe “the peace we will find on God’s holy mountain.”
What does Small herself do to get into Advent?
“Given that I’m so taken with the hope of the season, I try to practice doing hopeful things. [Father] Dan Berrigan, a great Jesuit and prophet of peace, asked, ‘How do you maintain peace?’ He said, ‘By doing hopeful things.’ Doing something hopeful. It doesn’t have to be big. It might be something I read, or making a contribution to making the world in the way I want it to be,” Small says.
“By really trying to practice something hopeful—we talk about Advent, about creating a space for Jesus in our heart—I feel my heart is primed to meet him, to recognize him, and I think even to recognize the places where that hope is so much more alive in the world. I feel like I’m meeting a kindred spirit,” she continues.
Sister Nancy Sheridan, a sister of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, has been leading retreats on Advent for about 15 years. About half the retreatants return year after year. “With time, I was able to ask them to help me choose the Advent theme for the following year,” Sister Sheridan says. This year’s theme is “Embracing Advent’s Stillness.”
“For most people who come to an Advent retreat in a very busy season, they’re searching for the silence and the quiet of the focusing on the essential—what Advent is about: the watching, the waiting, the wondering,” Sister Sheridan says.
The psalms and canticles associated with Advent are just part of it. “Advent stories involving the Annunciation, Joseph’s dreams—Advent is so rich in terms of its imagery and poetry that it speaks volumes,” Sister Sheridan says. Each year, she creates a piece of poetry inspired by the retreat that she sends to friends and colleagues.
Anybody needing a dose of hope or encouragement at this time can look to Sister Sheridan as an example. For the past several years, she has been living with stage 4 ovarian cancer. “But I continue with this journey because I believe strongly in it,” she says.
