Reclaiming Advent: Practical Suggestions for a Catholic Celebration of the Advent Season

Our culture starts to celebrate Christmas at best at midnight after Thanksgiving, but more and more at midnight after Halloween. However, in the Catholic Church, we do not start the Christmas season until the evening of December 24. Instead, we have a four-week preparation time leading up to Christmas called Advent, which begins on the Sunday closest to St. Andrew's Day, celebrated on November 30th. In the Catholic Church, the Christmas season then continues into January, until the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord. In fact, in an older Catholic tradition, Christmas celebrations didn't end until Candlemas, which is February 2.

In this article, we will explore how we can reconnect with the original purpose of the Advent season and how we can reintroduce Advent customs developed in the Catholic Church throughout the centuries, around the world. Let us rediscover how we can celebrate Advent in the Catholic way.

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What Is the Message of Advent? (Advent I - Cycle C)

This Sunday is the First Sunday of Advent, the beginning of a new liturgical year. Our society has different ways of calculating the timespan of a year. The civic calendar goes form January 1 to December 31. Schools follow the academic calendar, which begins late summer or early autumn and lasts until the spring. The fiscal year starts on July 1 and ends on June 30. A number of ethnic groups also maintain their own traditional calendars.

In the Catholic Church, our calendar is the liturgical year. We start on the First Sunday of Advent, which is the Sunday closest to the Feast of St. Andrew, observed on November 30. We then follow a sequence of seasons and feasts throughout the year, until the Feast of Christ the King, the last Sunday of the liturgical year.

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Inviting Christ to Be the King of Our Lives (Cycle B - Christ the King)

This Sunday, we celebrate the Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe, which is more popularly known as the Feast of Christ the King. While the feast has biblical roots, its observance was instituted more recently, in 1925 by Pope Pius XI. He did so in response to the growth of secular thinking in the West, whereby Christ was being pushed more and more out of the public sphere. The pope sought to remind the faithful and the world at large that Christ is King of all the world, now and always.

The Feast of Christ the King has various dimensions and applications to our lives. As discussed before, the Israelites expected the Messiah to be a great military conqueror, who would overthrown the Roman Empire, which was occupying the Holy Land at the time. In place of Roman rule, the Messiah would set up a new, glorious Israelite kingdom with Jerusalem as its capital.

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33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time: The Four Phases of Creation History

From a Catholic perspective, we can divide the history of the world into four phases. The first one is the original state of blessedness of humanity. When God created the world, he created a perfect world, without suffering or death. Humanity was to live in this perfect world without end. But through human sin, the world fell from grace, causing suffering and death to enter the human experience.

The fall of humanity ushered in the second phase of the history of the world, characterized by sorrow, the self-destructive cycle of sin, and the inevitability of death. But though the world had fallen into darkness, God did not abandon humanity. He called the Jewish people for a special mission. They were to be his chosen people, set apart from the rest of the world in preparation for the coming of the Messiah, who would redeem the fallen world. We see the centuries of preparation unfolding in the Old Testament Scriptures, through the ups and downs of the history of the Israelites, leading up to the coming of Christ.

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32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time: God Asks Only One Thing of Us

The reading from the Letter to the Hebrews, our Second Reading for this Sunday, continues the reflection on the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross. To understand the crucifixion more fully, we need to look back deep into Israelite history. The patriarchs of Israel moved to the land of Egypt, where the Israelites became a large and prosperous ethnic group. However, the Egyptian Pharaoh became jealous of their success and decided to enslave them. He then sought to destroy the Israelites by having every male child killed right after birth.

In response to their suffering, God sent Moses to free the Israelites form bondage. Moses sought to prevail upon Pharaoh to let the Israelites go, but Pharaoh would not listen. As a result, God performed 10 signs, also known as the 10 plagues, through Moses in order to persuade Pharaoh to set the captives free. The last of the signs was the angel of death flying over Egypt and striking down the firstborn male in every household. The Israelites themselves could avoid this punishment by each family gathering together to sacrifice and eat a lamb and marking their doorframes with the lamb’s blood. When the angel of death would see the blood upon the doorframe, it would pass over the house without causing harm.

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31st Sunday in Ordinary Time: Loving with God's Love

The scribe's question in this Sunday's Gospel passage may seem like a simple theological inquiry, but if we consider the larger context of the Gospel narrative, we can see that the scribe was trying to set a trap against Jesus. The passage takes place in Jerusalem, where many Jewish people have gathered for the Passover, the greatest feast of Judaism, celebrating the liberation of the Israelites from captivity in Egypt. However, the celebration is bittersweet, because by the time of Jesus, the Jewish people had been living under foreign occupation for hundreds of years. Just imagine a scenario where the United States has been conquered by a hostile country. What would it be like to celebrate the 4th of July while enemy tanks are patrolling the streets?

The celebration of the Passover was a highly charged time in Jerusalem, with the possibility of an uprising breaking out in order to overthrow the Romans, the current occupiers of the Holy Land. The atmosphere was especially tense at the time of Jesus because the prophecies of The Book of Daniel pointed to what we now call the first century AD as the time when the Messiah would arrive. The assumption was that the Messiah would be a military king who would defeat the Romans with divine help. As the city was preparing for the Passover, the celebration of the liberation of the Israelites, even small disturbances would have been enough for the crowds to rise up against their oppressors.

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30th Sunday in Ordinary Time: Leaving Everything Behind

In biblical times, healing was a sign of the coming of the Messiah. In The Book of Isaiah, we read: "Say to the fearful of heart: Be strong, do not fear! Here is your God, he comes with vindication; With divine recompense he comes to save you. Then the eyes of the blind shall see, and the ears of the deaf be opened; Then the lame shall leap like a stag, and the mute tongue sing for joy" (Isaiah 35:4-6). All four Gospels relate many miraculous healings performed by Jesus in fulfillment of this prophecy. One of those instances is the curing of the blind man in this Sunday's Gospel passage.

As the passage begins, Jesus is on his way from Jericho to Jerusalem. Today, a modern highway connects the two cities. In biblical times, the road was much less developed, but it was already a major thoroughfare, and one which had a bad reputation. The parable of the Good Samaritan also takes place along this road, highlighting the dangers of being alone in this area. But the blind man sits at the side of this dangerous road, begging. On the one hand, the busyness of the road can help him get more money from generous travelers. On the other hand, the roughness of the area puts him at risk of being robbed of whatever he is able to collect from benefactors. When Jesus passes by, he takes a leap of faith.

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