Advent 1: Random Musings
4 December 2006
Yesterday began Advent, the season of waiting and expectation (and repentance and conversion) that precedes Christmas and begins the Western liturgical year.
Last week, a student of mine told me he had to write a paper answering the question, “Does Christmas adversely affect Jewish celebrations of Hanukkah?” He asked me if I thought Christmas did. “I think Christmas adversely affects Christian celebrations of Christmas!”
Orthodox Christians have been at “Christmas Lent,” their name for the preparations for Christmas, for nineteen days now. They’ve been abstaining from various foods on various days of the week for more than two weeks. Strict fasts on a few times a week, with varying strictures on the remaining days, usually abstaining from milk, dairy, and eggs, abstaining sometimes from fish, and occaisionally wine and oil as well. Look here for a sense of what they do during this time; a legend to decipher the symbols is found beneath the calendar.
What do we do to prepare for Christmas? This is a tired question, I know, but it strikes me as somehow unseemly that we start the partying so early. Trees have been up for weeks, Christmas tchotchkes in stores for months.
I’m not advocating we ditch all our trees or refuse to attend any Christmas parties before the 25th. It would be an uncharitable thing to do, to make all these people feel terrible because their practice of this season is so different from what I feel should be the practice of the season. After all, they rightly celebrate this time of the year. This is a time for continued thanksgiving and joyful cherishing of what we have.
And yet I feel compelled to urge an inward turning.
Accept the invitation of a friend, and attend his party joyfully, but inwardly turn towards the renewal, the entering of Light into the world, that Christmas celebrates.
Put up your tree, but also take on some practice (not necessarily some sort of mortification like fasting) that shows that in preparation for Christmas, we have begun our conversion, we have begun to change, we have become the renewal which the birth of Christ promises the world.
Feast: John of Damascus
Today is the feast of John Damascus (AKA John Damascene) champion of orthodoxy and icons. Let us remember Holy John
4 December 2006 at 1:33 pm
I too get tired of the commercialization of the whole Christmas season. It is an old complaint, I know, but it really rubs me the wrong way. But what I think is important is that Advent is the season of waiting, of anticipation. So one can look on the bright side and see all of the trees and decorations and parties as something in anticipation of what is going to happen. Being the first year I’m celebrating Christmas in a Christian mindset for a long time, I am looking at the tree in my house as a reminder of what I am waiting for.