Advent – taken from Celebrating Christmas
The run-up to Christmas is considered by the church as the season of Advent, from the Latin ‘Adventus’, or ‘coming’. Advent is a time of preparation, lasting four weeks, which, while it should always involve reflection, sometimes involves fasting. The first mention of an ‘Advent Season’ was at the Council of Tours in 567, when a fast for monks in December was recorded. At the close of the 6th century, Gregory the Great of Rome made a rule of fasting for the four Sundays in Advent and soon the season became widely practised throughout the church.
In the past, Advent fasting could be substantial, with people avoiding such things as meat, dairy produce, fish, wine and oil. Today Advent fasting is often less severe, perhaps simply avoiding consuming things such as alcohol and chocolate. Fasting or not, Advent is valuable as a season of consideration and reflection; particularly about the universal need for us all to be rescued by God.
One aspect of Advent that should not be overlooked is the fact that, in Christian thinking, it is a season that looks not simply back to Jesus’ first coming in Bethlehem, but also forward to his final coming in his Second Advent at the end of history that will be unmistakable and inescapable.
In Advent the feast of Christmas is always on the horizon and there is an element of counting down to the great day. So, in many churches, the four Sundays before Christmas are celebrated by successively lighting four candles. For many people, especially those with children, the drawing near of Christmas is marked by the Advent calendar.
One problem with Advent today is that it has become a season where the demands of practical preparation can displace any spiritual reflection. For many people – particularly, I fear, mothers – the run up to Christmas is a stressful season with dilemmas and decisions over how to manage the looming festive season. Contrary to what some individuals in a family can imagine, the successful Christmas does not just happen. It involves detailed planning on buying presents, reducing the Christmas card list, drafting a summary of the year, ordering the turkey, organising dinner parties and other essential matters of who, where, when, what and how.
Ironically, and quite unintentionally, the way that commercialism and consumerism, preparation and panic have invaded the Advent season points to why we need a truer, deeper Christmas. Unless your festivities have a framework to give them shape and a focus to direct them, then other pressures – louder, more appealing and more urgent – will inevitably squeeze the season out of shape. Looking towards Christmas at Advent we need to keep ‘the main thing the main thing’. If we don’t, there is the danger of a festival where we are either continually operating in crisis-management mode or where secondary matters have taken centre stage and, in a phrase, the wrapping paper is getting more attention than the gift.
The church has always seen Advent as being not just about the first and second comings of Christ, but also about a third. With the first we look back to the historical nativity in Bethlehem. With the second we look forward to the second coming sometime in the future. With the third we look at ourselves: the arrival of Christ into our own lives. In the much-loved carol ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’ there is an important set of lines:
No ear may hear his coming,
But in this world of sin,
Where meek souls will receive him, still
The dear Christ enters in.
It’s all very well believing in Christ and his birth but it’s important not to miss the vital element of personally receiving him as our own Saviour and Lord.
