What to do about Advent – 29 November 2013

Advent starts in two days.  Here is something, pretty simple, which I wrote for my fellow Benedictine Oblates about the approach of Advent.  I have altered the bits that are addressed specifically to Oblates...

Advent is a strange time.  The church insists it is a penitential season, like Lent.  But it rarely feels that way.  As we know all too well, Christmas gets prematurely “celebrated” in the shops and in the expectations of children.  Schools and supermarkets have mindless carols and nativity clutter, to say nothing of Santa and reindeers, in the middle of Advent. Known widely as I am for my calm and even temperament, I can be reduced to helpless grinding of teeth when the sheer spiritual richness of words such as “God of God, Light of Light / Lo, he abhors not the Virgin’s womb...” is made mindless wallpaper music for the supermarket – and it’s not yet Christmas anyway.   We are citizens of 2013 in all its secular sentimental banality.  Not only is Advent not Christmas, but it is not capable of being secularised and commercialised without being distorted and destroyed.

No one who has listened to the Mozart or the Verdi requiems, the huge minor chords of the Dies Irae, and understood what is being conveyed there – and who pays attention to our world – is ready before Christmas Eve to celebrate Christmas.  Of course all that kind of thing is dreadfully inconvenient when you have to plan food and arrange presents and cater for the clamant expectations of modern grandchildren. 

We (Oblates) can do a little bit better, however.                                            

• During Advent we can find someone upon whom the Day of Wrath has descended in one form or another, and do what we can. 
• We can pay attention to the (sometimes very) difficult, even unpleasant, biblical readings of Advent, bearing in mind that the dire events set forth seem similar to what many are indeed experiencing around the world. 
• We can assess to what extent, in our life of contemplative stillness and silence, we are shedding the need to defend ourselves, to justify ourselves, to make ourselves safe at any rate, and are shedding the fear of mortality. 
• We can read, in our Lectio, what Benedict says about Humility [RB7], and be readier to greet the news of the helpless incarnate Christ in humble, awed delight. 

Love to the loveless shown,

That they might lovely be...