Today is the first Sunday of Advent. The term advent comes from Latin for “coming;” and while it harkens to the approach of Christmas, by definition it reminds us that Christmas has not yet arrived.

In fact, the liturgical texts used during the four weeks of the season of Advent remind the faithful of the “absence of Christ.” My Missal describes this in some detail:

The Masses for Advent strike a note of preparation and repentance mingled with joy and hope; hence, although the penitential violet is worn and the Gloria is omitted, the joyous Alleluia is retained. The readings from the Old Testament contained in the Introit, Gradual, Offertory, and Communion of the Masses, taken mostly from the prophecies of Isaias and from the Psalms, give eloquent expression to the longing of all nations for a Redeemer. We are impressed by repeated and urgent appeals to the Messias: “Come, delay no longer.” the Lessons from St. Paul urge us to dispose ourselves fittingly for His coming. The Gospels describe the terrors of the Last Judgment, foretell the second coming, and tell of the preaching of St. John the Baptist “to prepare the way of the Lord.”

Specifically, this Sunday, we read the following:

This First Sunday of Advent … is the first day of the Liturgical Year. The Mass prepares us this day for the double coming (adventus) of mercy and justice. That is why St. Paul tells us, in the Epistle, to cast off sin in order that, being ready for the coming of Christ as our Savior, we may also be ready for His coming as our Judge, of which we learn in the Gospel.

Let us prepare ourselves, by pious aspirations and by the reformation of our lives, for this twofold coming. Jesus our Lord will reward those who yearn for Him and await Him. “Those who trust in Him shall not be confounded.”

In his homily at the Church of Our Saviour, in New York City, Fr. Rutler charged us to “defy the unedifying rushing of Christmas by savoring these next three beautiful weeks of preparation, meditating on the Scripture readings and magnificent Advent hymnody.” Our Holy Father, too, in his November 27, 2005, Angelus address, explained that Advent is not only a time for preparing for Christmas, but also serves as a reminder that the salvation that began with Christ’s birth will be brought to completion when He comes again. Thus, the two attitudes that should characterize the way Christians live in Advent are “vigilance in prayer” and “exultance in praise,” with the aim being to be able to stand holy and blameless before the Lord at the end of time, he said. The pope further explained, “The guarantee that [this] can happen is offered by the faithfulness of God himself, who will not fail to bring to completion the work He began in each believer.”

Fr. Rutler leaves us with this reflection: “Celebrating Christmas in Advent should strike us almost as odd as celebrating Easter in Lent — and if it does not, it means that secular society has confused us instead of being taught by us.”

Christmas lasts twelve days and begins, not ends, on December 25.

Check out these great links for more on Advent:

• Catholic Encyclopedia
• EWTN Advent Calendar
• Catholic Answers: Ancient Catholic customs can control Christmas materialism
• American Catholic: Advent FAQ
• The Four Last Things

s the moral atmosphere of our culture becomes increasingly toxic, the most important things in life get neglected. The four holy weeks of Advent meditate on “The Last Things,” but considerations of death, judgment, heaven, and hell, are drowned out in the noise of false celebrations. It is easy to rush Christmas if you do not believe in it, for then it is not a real feast, and can be moved around at will.

If we do not think about the holy mystery of death, we shall be mindless when it comes. Dr. Johnson said, “The prospect of hanging concentrates the mind wonderfully.” Mechanical elves and the false bonhomie of a vapid “holiday season” cannot totally distract the thinking mind from the fact that as we get older, the people in photographs of family and friends fade from this world along with their pictures.

In this holy year of the 2000th anniversary of St. Paul’s birth, he reminds us that all things that God created are good (1 Tim. 4:4) and yet all creatures have fallen through Original Sin (Rom. 8:20) and await redemption (Rom. 8:21-23). The Prince of Lies who caused the world’s calamity is the temporary “god of this age” but only a false god, and the true God has not abandoned what he made (Rom. 1:20). Evil eats away at goodness. The risen Christ’s triumph over death is also a triumph over Satan who can fool us by appearing as an “angel of light” with seductive promises that pervert the moral order (2 Cor. 2:11). “Death is swallowed up in victory” (1 Cor. 15:54).

As we come into this world to live, Christ came into it to die, so that “all might be made alive” (1 Cor. 15:22). Jesus wept when his friend Lazarus died, not out of despair, but with tears of compassion for those who were mourning him without hope. He wept over Jerusalem, not because he was going to die there, but because it was going to reject him. He wept a third time, tears of gratitude, unrecorded in Scripture, when his guardian Joseph died. No one died a more benevolent death than this humble foster-father, attended at his deathbed by Jesus and Mary. So St. Joseph is the patron saint of a holy death. With a joy “which passes all understanding,” Christians prepare properly for Christmas by praying:

O

glorious Saint Joseph, accept the offering I make to you. Be my father, protector, and guide in the way of salvation. Obtain for me purity of heart and a love for the spiritual life. After your example, let all my actions be directed to the greater glory of God, in union with the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the Immaculate Heart of Mary, and your own paternal heart. Finally, pray for me that I may share in the peace and joy of your holy death. Amen.

Thanksgiving has come and gone, and the liturgical season of Advent is upon us. In 2007, First Things editor Joseph Bottum published an excellent piece entitled “The End of Advent.” Here are a few excerpts for your enjoyment and reflection.

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hristmas has devoured Advent, gobbled it up with the turkey giblets and the goblets of seasonal ale. Every secularized holiday, of course, tends to lose the context it had in the liturgical year. Across the nation, even in many churches, Easter has hopped across Lent, Halloween has frightened away All Saints, and New Year’s has drunk up Epiphany.

Still, the disappearance of Advent seems especially disturbing—for it’s injured even the secular Christmas season: opening a hole, from Thanksgiving on, that can be filled only with fiercer, madder, and wilder attempts to anticipate Christmas.

More Christmas trees. More Christmas lights. More tinsel, more tassels, more glitter, more glee—until the glut of candies and carols, ornaments and trimmings, has left almost nothing for Christmas Day. For much of America, Christmas itself arrives nearly as an afterthought: not the fulfillment, but only the end, of the long Yule season that has burned without stop since the stores began their Christmas sales.

Of course, even in the liturgical calendar, the season points ahead to Christmas. Advent genuinely is adventual—”a time before,” “a looking forward”—and it lacks meaning without Christmas. But maybe Christmas, in turn, lacks meaning without Advent. … A kind of longing pervades the Old Testament selections read in church over the weeks before Christmas—an anxious, almost sorrowful litany of hope only in what has not yet come.

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hat Advent is, really, is a discipline: a way of forming anticipation and channeling it toward its goal. There’s a flicker of rose on the third Sunday—Gaudete!, that day’s Mass begins: Rejoice!—but then it’s back to the dark purple that is the mark of the season in liturgical churches. And what those somber vestments symbolize is the deeply penitential design of Advent. Nothing we can do earns us the gift of Christmas, any more than Lent earns us Easter. But a season of contrition and sacrifice prepares us to understand and feel something about just how great the gift is when at last the day itself arrives.

More than any other holiday, Christmas seems to need its setting in the church year, for without it we have a diminishment of language, a diminishment of culture, and a diminishment of imagination. The Jesse trees and the Advent calendars, St. Martin’s Fast and St. Nicholas’ Feast, Gaudete Sunday, the childless crèches, the candle wreaths, the vigil of Christmas Eve: They give a shape to the anticipation of the season. They discipline the ideas and emotions that otherwise would shake themselves to pieces, like a flywheel wobbling wilder and wilder till it finally snaps off its axle.

Maybe that’s what has happened to Christmas. The ideas and the emotions have all broken free and smashed their way across the fields. … [As in] Irving Berlin’s “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas / Just like the ones I used to know,” there has been for a long time now something oddly backward looking about Christmas music—some nostalgia that insists on substituting its melancholy for the somber contrition and sorrow of forward-looking Advent.

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hese days, by the time Christmas actually rolls around, it feels as though this is very nearly what we’ve had: Christmas every day, at least since Thanksgiving. Often it starts even earlier. This year the glossy catalogues of Christmas clothing and seasonal bric-a-brac started arriving in September, and there were Christmas-shopping ads on the highway billboard signs before Halloween. The anticipatory elements reach a crescendo by early December, and their constant scream makes the sudden quiet of Christmas Day almost a relief from the Christmas season.

I don’t remember this opposition of Christmas and the Christmas season when I was young. When I was little—ah, the nostalgia of the childhood memoir—I always felt that the days right before Christmas were a time somehow out of time. Christmas Eve, especially, and the arrival of Christmas itself at midnight: The hours moved in ways different from their passage in ordinary time, and the sense of impending completion was somehow like a flavor even to the air we breathed.

I’ve noticed in recent years, however, that the ­feeling comes over me more rarely than it used to, and for shorter bits of time. I have to pursue the sense of wonder, the taste in the air, and cling to it self-consciously. Even for me, the endless roar of untethered Christmas anticipation is close to drowning out the disciplined anticipation of Advent. And when Christmas itself arrives, it has begun to seem a day not all that different from any other. Oh, yes, church and home to a big dinner. Presents for the children. A set of decorations. But nothing special, really.

It is this that Advent, rightly kept, would prevent—the thing, in fact, it is designed to halt. Through all the preparatory readings, through all the genealogical Jesse trees, the somber candles on the wreaths, the vigils, and the hymns, Advent keeps Christmas on Christmas Day: a fulfillment, a perfection, of what had gone before. I shall see him, but not now: I shall behold him, but not nigh.

Read the full article here.

From Pope Benedict XVI’s public address on Italy’s Thanksgiving Day, November 12, 2006:

Today … the annual Day of Thanksgiving is being observed…. In our families, we teach the little ones to thank the Lord always before eating, with a brief prayer and the sign of the cross. This custom must be kept or rediscovered, because it teaches [us] not to take our ‘daily bread’ for granted, but to recognize in it a gift of Providence. We should get into the habit of blessing the Creator for each thing: for air and water, precious elements which are the foundation of life on our planet; as well as for food that, through the fecundity of the earth, God gives us for our sustenance. Jesus taught his disciples to pray, asking the heavenly Father not for ‘my’ but for ‘our’ daily bread. Thus, he wanted every man to feel co-responsible for his brothers, so that no one would be without what is necessary to live. The earth’s products are a gift given by God for the whole human family.

he Statuary Hall in the Capitol in Washington has fifty statues representing a representative hero of each state. Three of them are of Catholic priests: Father Eusebio Kino of Arizona, Blessed Junipero Serra of California, and Blessed Damien de Veuster of Hawaii.

These priestly presences may irritate the secularists who are trying to renovate our public buildings into temples of self-exaltation. The Ten Commandments are engraved on the Supreme Court building where guides now refer to them as “Ten Amendments.” There are efforts to remove references to God from the burial rites in Arlington National Cemetery.

A visitors’ center in the Capitol finally is being completed at a mind-boggling cost of $600 million of your tax money. Typical of government projects, its completion is several years late and hundreds of millions of dollars over budget. While its marble corridors will feature displays of Earth Day celebrations and AIDS rallies along with information about industry, it will ignore the Christian roots and heritage of our country. The original plans left out the national motto “In God We Trust” and the arrival of Christian missionaries was mentioned in passing as an “invasion.” To date, 108 members of Congress have signed a petition against this disservice to history.

It would be easy to exploit this out of demagoguery, and some politicians do indeed like to pose righteously protesting against “the removal of God” from our culture. That kind of rhetoric itself betrays some insecurity about God’s ability to be God. God cannot be removed from anything because he is eternal and omnipresent. Attempts to marginalize God only marginalize those who try. The Catholic should understand this better than anyone, for the Holy Church outlives all nations and cultures. In the practical order, however, many nominal Catholics do not realize how they have been invaded by banal agnosticism and degraded by cultural mediocrity. Once in preparing a wedding, a bride from another part of the country wanted excerpts from Ernest Hemingway and Kahlil Gibran read as scripture in the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony. Her reaction to my refusal was the indignation of an indulged youth who had never been denied access to a parallel universe of sentimental delights. It has been observed that even many self-styled Christians seek no Saviour for they do not know that there is anything to be saved from.

A presidential proclamation of Thanksgiving Day enshrines a civic obligation to the Divine Creator, but for some it is a vestigial tribute to custom, encroached by football and parades. No president is a pontiff, and civic prayers are only commentary on the Eucharistic duty of the stewards of God’s creation. So the Feast of Christ the King, which we celebrate today, puts all civic intuitions of God into perspective, and reminds us that Jesus was crowned with thorns by self-satisfied people who hymned their way to destruction by shouting, “We have no king but Caesar.”

Ora, ora pro nobis.

don’t usually post about computers and technology (although it is a big interest of mine), but I thought I’d share some exciting footage of the recent Windows 7 demonstration by Microsoft at the PDC 2008 conference.

As many of you are aware, the present version of Windows — Windows Vista, previously codenamed “Longhorn,” or Windows version 6 — has been met by mixed reviews. The Longhorn project was an ambitious rewrite of the Windows codebase, and its first few months were plagued by hardware compatibility problems, lack of drivers, and numerous other bugs. The first service pack, SP1, corrected most of the common problems, and Vista is now a very reliable operating system — but a stigma is still attached to it, as exemplified (and perpetuated) by Apple Computer’s famous “I’m a Mac… and I’m a PC” television ads.

Be that as it may, Microsoft has built upon its new Vista framework to develop Windows 7. The result? Even in its pre-beta state, Windows 7 is elegant and powerful. Its user interface is intuitive and comfortable, and it offers many new features (such as built-in multitouch surface interface support) that are sure to please both the casual user and power user. Below are two video presentations from the PDC that showcase some of Windows 7’s new features.