Advent: The Start of a New Year and a New Adventure
St. George and the Dragon by John Ruskin. PD
Light the candles and ring the bells, a new year has begun! I love Advent. It is a time of beginning, a time of waiting, a time of adventure. Today is the first Sunday of Advent, which means a new liturgical year has begun. One of the things that drew me into the Catholic Church was the attention to time, re-envisioning it. The new year does not begin on January 1st, nor with the start of a new school year, nor with the start of a new fiscal year. In many ways, it isn’t a beginning. It is a beginning of a beginning.
If the liturgical year were to start like the secular year, I imagine we’d start with Christmas, the celebration of the birth of Christ. But the Church does not start us there. Rather, she starts us in waiting. I think this is a lesson many men, in particular, need. We do not go through the same kind of waiting women do in pregnancy. It is something external to us, not internal. So, the Church Year begins with a pregnant pause. We wait for the coming of Christ. We wait with Mary; we wait with the Israelites in the Wilderness looking for the promised land; we wait with the Jews for the coming Messiah. No gun goes off to sound the start of the race. Rather, we begin in preparation.
This is the state we are more naturally in, anyway. We are still waiting for the coming Christ. We are awaiting his return when he will make all things new. But we are not meant to rest on our laurels. No. We are meant to prepare. Like the virgins who brought extra oil, enough to see them through the night, we need to prepare, to be ready. That is the life of the Church all year. But in our liturgy, we prepare for Christ’s return. Yes, Christmas will come, and all our preparations now will be, in part, for that wonderful celebration. But even the celebration of Christ’s first coming is a preparation for his second. The feasting we do now is just as much a preparation for the feasting we will do at the wedding feast of the lamb, as the fasting we do now prepares us for the feast of the Nativity.
I’ve been re-reading Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene. It is a wonderful tale of knighthood, purity, holiness, and more. Currently, I am still journeying with the Redcrosse Knight. He had to learn holiness before he could face the dragon wreaking havoc on Princess Una’s people. He had to prepare not just in might of arms, but in virtue before he could face such a monster. We are going on a similar adventure. We too are facing off against a fearsome dragon. And so we must also prepare, not in might, but in virtue, in holiness. This is the opportunity Advent gives to us. All we have to do is take it.
