The Beauty of the Season

“This season is not about all the stuff, this season is about a promise that what God says God will do, He will do. Even if He says I’m gonna send a Savior – and it takes 700 years for that promise to come true – God is gonna do what God says He’s gonna do, and He’s gonna do that for every single one of us that puts our hope in Him.

We can’t change the culture…but we are God’s people, and God’s people have to live at a different speed and rhythm than the speed of the world…If you feel burnt out with Christmas, say to God ‘okay, I’m done with Christmas. Can you birth Christmas again in my heart?'” -Louie Giglio

Those quotes above are from Protestant Pastor Louie Giglio of Passion City Church in an interview he recently gave which was focused on the season of Advent for Relevant Magazine’s Podcast. Giglio is spearheading a revival of the season of Advent in the Modern, Evangelical Christian community in the United States, and it is an incredibly moving and beautiful thing to hear. Even for many Catholics who have grown up with this tradition, it might be time that, together with our Evangelical brothers and sisters, we take a new look at this season and reflect on what it’s really about, allowing Christ to, as Giglio says, re-birth Christmas in our hearts, and letting Him truly be present in our lives this Christmas.

Christians of all sorts are re-discovering Advent because there is something altogether unique happening in this season. For centuries, the Catholic Church has understood this; we follow a seasonal calendar because we know that there is an importance to the cyclical nature of life, and our Church has long understood that this sort of cyclical movement can be incredibly beneficial for our spiritual life. As a part of this calendar, of course, we observe Advent: a season of fasting, prayer, and penance as we wait in joyful hope for the imminent birth of the Savior of the World.

On Christmas morning, we know, we wake up to a world renewed with the birth of a Savior; this, of course, is not something we are waiting to have happen for the first time, but rather it is a reality which happened 2,000 years ago which we must now allow to live deep inside of our hearts and be a part of our lives. When we, as modern Christians, wake up on Christmas morning, something in our lives should be different, too. For each of us, the reality that Christ entered the world, born of a Virgin, lived, was crucified, and then rose from the dead should pervade every single aspect of our lives; when we wake up each and every single morning there should be something different in the way that we perceive and experience reality, and of course this should never be more true than Christmas morning.

Advent, then, a season which can often be misunderstood as a busy, party-filled shopping season, needs to instead be a time of preparation of our hearts which will allow the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ to change the way that we live and experience reality. On Christmas, we remember the concrete reality that the God of all creation entered into our sinful, frail humanity at a specific time and a place and with this action changed the entire course of human history. In this season of preparation for the time when we will commemorate that birth, then, we ought to allow our hearts and our lives to be transformed in this time and place by what happened in the little town of Bethlehem some 2,000 years ago. In Her wisdom, the Church has given us a time to do that; not meaning that we have to avoid Christmas music and decorations completely, but rather that, as Giglio said above, we need to move at a different speed and rhythm than the speed of the world to allow our hearts to be conformed to the heartbeat of that little child wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger.

Christmas is the ultimate celebration of the fulfillment of our hope, where we remember that God did what God promised, and that through the fulfillment of this promise He offered each and every one of us new life. In Advent, then, we ought to be more and more a people of hope, allowing the hope in our Savior to enter into our hearts, our minds, and our lives in a concrete and real way, and through the hope we have alive in our hearts bringing the entire culture with us to the truth of what Christmas means.

“Advent is the spiritual season of hope par excellence, and in this season the whole Church is called to be hope.” -Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI