Liturgy: The Church's Spirituality
Bruce T. Morrill, S.J.

ADVENT AND CHRISTMAS:
SEEKING THE SPIRITUALITY OF THE SEASON

Perhaps contemporary Roman Catholics experience the greatest dissonance between keeping the seasons of the Church Year and participating in the commercially driven seasons of wider society during the Christmas Cycle, beginning with the arrival of Advent.  While the feasts of Christmas (December 25th) and Epiphany (January 6th) comprise the climax and conclusion, respectively, of this season of the Church Year, the market cycle brings Christmas decorations and music to stores by mid-November at the latest, and the news media observe their annual ritual of analyzing the size and "buying mood" of the crowds on the Friday after Thanksgiving, the biggest shopping day of the year.  From then on disc jockeys intermittently play Christmas songs and television networks compete to be first in rerunning the "holiday classics."  Christmas is already in the air by the time the Church celebrates the First Sunday of Advent, which falls sometime between November 27th and December 3rd.  As Christmas parties in workplaces, schools, and other circles are scheduled into the weekends of December, we walk on those same weekends into churches that are marked by perhaps some plain boughs, an Advent wreath, and purple vestments.  Shouldn't the Church "get with the season?", more than a few people wonder.

We feel the dissonance no less at the other end of our liturgical season of Christmas.  The worked-up hype for Christmas ends on December 24th, not only with the closing of stores but also, for so many Roman Catholics, with the celebration of the Vigil Mass, late that afternoon or early evening, and then the opening of presents and so forth.  Time then emerges for the invaluable gift of sharing our lives, of visiting relatives and friends as well as, hopefully, the lonely or neglected, and of sitting for an extended time around dinner tables to feel the unique bond known only in a festive meal.  And then, isn't Christmas over?

Those who continue to celebrate the Christmas season liturgically through the following two Sundays return to churches still decked with poinsettias and wreathes, nativity scenes and candles.  Christmas hymns and carols abound, and scripture readings recount wise men and the flight to Egypt or the presentation of the infant Jesus in the Temple.  But the liturgy can feel a bit odd if our homes are already stripped of Christmas, if—as is the case for many Catholics as well as others—the decorations went up not long after the American holiday of Thanksgiving and Christmas ended on the 24th or, at the latest, the 25th.  Doesn't it sometimes feel like the Church has put its own red-ribboned wreathes and lighted trees up too late and left them around, rather embarrassingly, a bit too long?

All of this symbolic dissonance has given rise to a variety of reactions among believers.  Many people take consolation in the subdued liturgical space of the Advent Season as a prayerful get-away from the frenetic character of the weeks leading to Christmas Day.  The Sunday Masses of Advent provide a sort of retreat, in four installments, during which familiar, even ancient, Advent songs, biblical readings bespeaking confident expectation and joy, and the promise of new life associated with the birth of a baby touch deep emotions and thoughts that might otherwise be lost on the rushing surface of shopping, parties, gift-wrapping and travel.  Others revel in the counter-cultural message of the Advent and Christmas season, although just exactly what that message is may vary.  Some might fall in line with a contemporary adage: "Christ is the reason for the Season."  A more negatively critical version of this approach is the call by some that "we need to get the 'Christ' back in 'Christmas.'"  Still others might counter that Christ has been there all along in countless quiet ways, in every gesture of reunion, every sign of love shared, every act of charity.

In the coming installments of this series we shall explore Advent and Christmas as a liturgical season, looking to the history and contemporary form of this tradition of the Church for insights into how we might celebrate it more fully, consciously, and actively.  When we look to the Church's liturgy as the source for a spirituality of Advent and Christmas, what we find might at times be surprising but, more importantly, nourishing for our faith.