Advent Reflections

Advent and Lent are the two major penitential seasons of the liturgical year. As Christians, we are called during these seasons to sacrifice and prayer in preparation for a glorious event.

Every time God’s people celebrate God’s glory, they must first go through a time of penitence. There is no Easter Sunday without the agony of Good Friday. Similarly, Christ’s birth does not happen without a period of longing on the part of the Chosen People for the Messiah.

But for many Christians today, Lent is the primary season of penitence for Christians, while Advent is an afterthought. This is partially because Lent is, quite simply, a longer and more intense period - 40 days in the wilderness. Advent is a shorter time of waiting, so to speak, and entails comparatively less sacrifice.

But this state of affairs is also because the period before Christmas has been kidnapped by retailers and transformed into "the holiday season" Advent has been commercialized in our society, recreated into a time to worship the almighty dollar. 

Christmas in the modern world begins on Black Friday, with the secular advent of the shopping season (or even earlier). Christmas songs start around Thanksgiving, "holiday decorations" (now increasingly without Christ) go up weeks before Christmas.

This may be acceptable for a secular society which cares little for the coming of Christ; it is wrong and foolish for Christians to embrace these customs. Advent is a time of waiting and self-restraint in preparation for the glorious coming of Christ, not a period of slavish devotion to sales. We Christians have days after Christmas to celebrate Christ’s birth.

Our Christmas begins December 25. Let us purify ourselves before His coming!

"What If God Was One of Us?"

I was driving home a couple days ago, when a long-forgotten song about Jesus came on the radio. The song exemplifies the blindness of the modern world when it comes to the person of Jesus Christ.

The song is titled “One of Us,” and the question posed by the song is “What if God was one of us?” The song’s lyrics begin as follows:

If God had a name what would it be?
And would you call it to his face?
If you were faced with him
In all his glory
What would you ask if you had just one question?

(Refrain) And yeah, yeah, God is great
Yeah, yeah, God is good
Yeah, yeah, yeah-yeah-yeah

What if God was one of us?
Just a slob like one of us
Just a stranger on the bus
Trying to make his way home

And so on.

We already know the answer to the question posed by the song. As Christians, we know that God indeed was one of us – He lived among us for thirty-three years, in the person of Jesus Christ.

The song questions what would happen if God felt the same pain and temptations we felt. But we know that Christ suffered horrible pain and longing - that He was born in a stable, was hunted by an evil king in his infancy, lived His childhood years in poverty and anonymity, and was abandoned by all except His closest friends and family during His excruciating death on a cross. St. Paul tells us that Christ was “tempted in all things like we are, yet without sin.” (Heb 4:15)

The whole of Christianity is the answer to the question “What if God was one of us?” God, in the person of Jesus Christ, was truly one of us - poor, meek, and lowly.

It is a sign of the poverty of the modern world that so many of our counterparts have forgotten (or worse, deliberately ignore) this incredible, joyous truth. It is our task to remind them of it, especially during this Christmas season, in which we celebrate Christ, born as a human being.

Let us proclaim Christ’s glorious humanity loud and clear to the rest of the world through our words and holy example.

Have a blessed Christmas, dear readers.