Gaudete: joy

Today, the Third Sunday of Advent, is “Gaudete Sunday,” so named from the first word of the entrance verse for the Mass: Gaudete in Domino semper: iterum dico, gaudete “Rejoice in the Lord always: again I say it, Rejoice!... the Lord is near” (Phil 4:4). The priest and the altar clad themselves in rose colored vestments to express the Church’s joyful expectation of the Lord’s imminent arrival. We anticipate the Lord not with fear and trembling but with resolute joy, a joy born of our unfaltering faith in God’s providence. The Prophet Isaiah in our first reading confirms our hope: “The desert and the parched land will exult; the steppe will rejoice and bloom. They will bloom with abundant flowers … they will meet with joy and gladness, sorrow and mourning will flee.” As bad as it seems at times here below, we believe that sorrow and mourning will flee before his face.
 
I was inspired by the steadfast joy of a homeless woman with her child last week. They were praying in our church, before the Blessed Sacrament, radiating gladness. In all the city no one will give them a permanent home, but here, she said, in this church, before Jesus, I have a home. I can see from this altar my true homeland, beyond this vale of tears, a place God has prepared for me and my child. It is my task to persevere in joy here on earth, serving him and serving his servants, until it is his good pleasure to take me home. Consider that we celebrated Our Lady of Guadalupe today, and how our Lady too was with child and homeless: no one had a place for her. But she did not give into impatience, negativity. So she brought to the indigenous people of the Americas in 1531, a reason for hope, a reason to live. Joy comes to the hearts of those who welcome Our Lady with simple trust, as did Juan Diego. “Am I not here who am your mother?” she said to him, and he bowed in simple trust to her maternal heart.

Patience

Why do we become gloomy, why do we become negative during our long earthly pilgrimage toward heaven? Is it not because we become impatient? Be patient, brothers and sisters, until the coming of the Lord. See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains.… Do not complain, brothers and sisters, about one another.” To become impatient with God, to become negative about each other, is the devil’s work. In the darkest of times, there is always light.
 
This Present Darkness
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Next week will see the darkest day of the year, just before the Winter Solstice. There is no longer and colder night than December 21st. Christmas brightens the long winter of our earthly exile. In this month of December the Church celebrates feasts of light. Last week we celebrated the Immaculate Conception, the “white dawn announcing the Son’s rising.” Tuesday we celebrate St. Lucy, a child martyr of the 3rd century whose name means light (Lucy from “lux”), and whose radiant joy overcame the hatred of her executioners. In two weeks we celebrate the greatest of all Festivals of Light, the star of Bethlehem, the radiance of angels over nighttime flocks, the Solemnity of Christmas. “O that birth forever blessed,” writes Aurelius Prudentius in his 4th C hymn. “When the Virgin, full of grace, Overshadowed by the Spirit, Bore the Savior of our Race.”
 
Let the light of Christ shine in our homes and workplaces. Do not let the devil blow out our radiant joy. Keep very close to our Lady, despising the shame which the world casts upon those who hold to a simple faith. Are Christians simple? Yes, we are, because life is simple. God is good, and it seems that, at least at Christmas, everyone believes again in the simple goodness of all that God has created and redeemed through his Divine Son.

The Day of Judgment
Advent is composed of two stages, from Dec 1-16, in which we prepare for Jesus’ Second Coming and his Final Judgment, and Dec 18-24, the novena for Christmas. Today’s readings and prayers speak rather of that Judgement: justice will be meted out to the wicked and mercy to the righteous. The prayer over the gifts: “O Lord, since we have no merits to plead our cause, come, we pray, to our rescue…” And the Preface: “We watch for that day to inherit the great promise in which we now dare to hope.” The first reading: “Not by appearance shall he judge: he shall strike the ruthless with the rod of his mouth and slay the wicked.” And the Gospel: “Repent, …you brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? Even now the ax lies at the root.” Trees that bear no fruit will be cut down and thrown into fire.
 
Certainly everyone fears judgment. Even in our “enlightened” and “liberated” society, or perhaps especially among people that ignore the existence of a Divine Authority, people sense that man’s injustice cannot go on forever. But if God is not my judge, then no one is my judge? So people avoid judgment in cases of obvious wrongdoing—they hire lawyers to contest simple traffic tickets and insist on their innocence in cases of even grave crime. You just need the right lawyer—remember the many corporate fraud cases such as Enron and Worldcom. You will hear people say “I left the Church because it is so judgmental.” “No one can impose their morality on me.” We all pretend that somehow we will escape judgment, and many go so far as to pretend that God and natural law do not even exist. But as one of my seminary professors said, “you can’t break the natural law; you can only break against the natural law.”
 
The Winnowing Fan
Advent, like Lent, is a season to prepare for the coming of Christ by confessing, and submitting to, his divine judgment. That judgment is fearsome, for it submits itself to no human appeal. That judgment is also our only hope, for it decisively corrects human error. There will come a day, the last of human history, when God will right this tilting ship. There will come a time when the wolf will be the guest of the lamb, and the child will play by the cobra’s den—when children will play next to buildings that were once abortion clinics.  There will come a day when “the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the Lord, as the water covers the sea.” That day will surely come, for God has promised it, and his promises are sure. But it will come only after the judgment, because divine mercy comes to us only through divine justice. Is Jesus a meek and mild baby in the lap of his maiden mother Mary, or is Jesus a terrifying Judge coming on the clouds with fearsome power? He is both: for the faithful, Christ’s judgment is mercy; for the unfaithful, his judgment is swift and terrible justice.
 
We will all be threshed
“All Judea and the whole region” were rushing to John the Baptist by the River as they “acknowledged their sins.” God’s judgment is a threshing, a separation: he will separate wheat from chaff. The chaff he will burn and the wheat he will gather to himself, into his barn (heaven). John asserts that “His winnowing fan is in his hand….” A winnowing fan was a pitchfork that a farmer used to toss the mixture of wheat and chaff into the air, so that the wind could blow away the chaff while the heavier grain would fall to earth. It is said that a friend is one who separates wheat from chaff in the one he loves. And yet this separation, while a necessary dynamic of friendship painfully shakes us up.
 
God threshes every man, shaking out our sins like a man shakes out a dirty rug. He is doing that already, for purgatory begins now, in this life. Let God thresh and winnow you. “Take what he gives, and give what he takes, with a big smile,” in the words of Mother Teresa. A saint is simply one who submits herself to the threshing judgment of God, who does not resist when she is tossed about by divine providence, who allows herself to be purified of her chaff. Trust the Lord’s threshing of your life, for He knows what he is about.
 
The Immaculate Conception 
Tuesday is the patronal feast of our Nation, the Immaculate Conception, although we will celebrate it tomorrow so as not to displace a Sunday. Our Lady is the only daughter of men that did not need to be threshed, because she had no sin. And yet God did thresh her: he led her through trial, sorrow, confusion, and darkness. Like Jesus, she experienced the full weight of sin’s consequences, even though herself without sin. If even she patiently underwent this threshing, cannot we also patiently accept God’s disciplines in our lives? With her, we gladly offer difficulties, aches and pains, perplexities, weaknesses, and darkness. We allow God to winnow us, so that we may gathered into his heaven with the Immaculata and all the saints, for he is the judge, the just judge, living and reigning forever and ever. Amen.

Santa’s Prayer
We have entered the Season of Advent, but of course the Christmas lights have been up for weeks now. Last week I celebrated Black Friday by taking some out-of-town friends to Macy’s tree lighting ceremony at Union Square. The streets around the Square was packed with happy people radiating an air of anticipation. Something good was going to happen. And lo, Santa himself showed up at 6:30 to lead us in a countdown… 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 …zzztt! The giant green tree lit up with flashing white lights, and everyone cheered.
 
But it was really something, to see so many people emanating a certain Christmas joy. It struck me that in fact this tree lighting ceremony was a sort of liturgy, complete with vestments (the fire chief in his dress uniform, the master of ceremonies in a shining red gown, Santa in his red suit and furry hat). There was music, most partook of some food, and Santa even offered a prayer that this Christmas would bring peace and joy to our city. He knew that in the back of everyone’s mind, as dozens of city police stood tensely on the perimeter, were recent terrorist attacks in just such gatherings as this. But we came nonetheless, because everyone needs “liturgy,” special ceremonies that lift us out of ourselves and give hope for a better future.

Advent looks forward, not backward
The Scriptures and prayers of this first Sunday of Advent look to that better future, because they speak not of Christ’s first coming 2000 years ago but his Second Coming. St. Paul urges us to “to be blameless in holiness … at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his holy ones.” He wrote these words fifty years after the first Christmas, expecting his return. Notice also that Jeremiah in the first reading describes a future that has not yet come to pass: “In those days Judah shall be safe and Jerusalem shall dwell secure…” Jerusalem has never known security (the “security fence” fifteen years ago has only led to more violence), and most of the world’s terrorism comes from the interminable dispute between Jew and Arab.

Running to Jesus
The opening prayers, or collects, for Advent are among the most beautiful. Consider today’s prayer, the first for the New Year: “Grant your faithful, we pray, Almighty God, the resolve to run forth to meet your Christ…” We don’t just waiting around, but we run to Christ. Don’t we all prepare for Christmas by running about, displaying the most spectacular energy of the year—decking the halls, trimming the trees, singing the carols, stirring the eggnog, planning social after social. Since we were children, we have run toward Christmas, as we should. The prayer continues: “run to meet your Christ with righteous deeds, so that gathered at his right hand, [we] may be worthy to possess the heavenly kingdom.” Decking halls is delightful, but “good deeds” are the essential Christmas decorations. No good can come from us that doesn’t come from our interior life, and so above all Advent is a time for deeper prayer: daily Mass, daily Scripture, a good confession, and attending your parish mission.

Prepare Ye
At His First Coming, God came as a darling baby on the lap of his virgin mother Mary. At His Second Coming, Christ will come on the clouds with power and great glory. “Beware,” Jesus warns us, that “that day catch you by surprise like a trap. [It] will assault everyone who lives on the face of the earth.” Jesus describes his Second Coming as an “assault” and a “trap”— sobering words. We cannot simply wait for the Second Coming; we need to prepare for it and even run toward it.
 
Advent prepares us for our own death, for Jesus will return to us on the day we die, if we don’t live long enough to see the end of the world. We long for the Advent of a bright, new world, when justice, and the fruit of that justice, which is enduring peace. But first the old order must pass away. No one can better take us through that death, and prepare us for the rebirth, better than the Mother of God. Even as we fight our way through the malls and stage our parties and write our cards, let’s make every Christmas preparation an act of prayer. Buy gifts that will help people become more human, bring Christ into your Christmas parties with a reading of Scripture or praying the rosary, and send cards with Jesus and Mary on them rather than a tawdry rendition of Santa and Rudolf. Let’s not just walk, but run to meet Jesus this Advent.

The Angelus Prayer

Does anyone recognize the Collect for today’s Mass? “Pour forth, we beseech you O Lord, your grace into our hearts that we to whom the incarnation of Christ, your Son, was made known by the message of an angel, may by his passion and cross, be brought the glory of his resurrection?” It is the “Angelus Prayer,” which Catholics for centuries have prayed three times a day. In Europe all the church bells ring at noon, as do our own bells here at Star of the Sea, calling us to this prayer. We would do well to regain this tradition.

The Angelus prayer reflects today’s Gospel, which is the Annunciation, the precise moment in which the eternal Word became incarnate. The mystery of the Incarnation stands at the head of all the Christian mysteries. This first mystery of the rosary contains all the other mysteries within it. God became man, so that man might become God. We ‘become God’ not because we are capable of anything great, but because God shares his divine life with us. It is by his own gracious will that He brings us into himself. “God does not choose the qualified; he qualifies those whom he chooses.” It is only for us to surrender to that perfect will.

Total Surrender

No human being had ever, or has ever, or will ever perfectly surrender to God except the Blessed Virgin Mary. Only she who was conceived without original sin could do this, and she did do it. The rest of humanity is trapped in the fears, addictions, and dysfunctions of Original Sin. But the wonder of Christmas is that one person did completely surrender to God’s perfect will in loving trust.

God has always loved us, but we have not always loved God. It was at the precise moment when the young maiden of Nazareth chose to trust him completely that the world changed. The human and divine wills, for the first time in the history of our race, perfectly aligned, and she became the mother of all the living, humanity’s solitary boast, our one great merit to become children of God. That’s why Christmas is not just about Jesus, and the US Post Office doesn’t just have a Christmas stamp with Jesus, but a picture of Jesus and Mary, Mary holding Jesus.

Gaudete: joy

Today, the Third Sunday of Advent, is “Gaudete Sunday,” so named from the first word of the entrance verse for the Mass: Gaudete in Domino semper: iterum dico, gaudete “Rejoice in the Lord always: again I say it, Rejoice!... the Lord is near” (Phil 4:4). The priest and the altar clad themselves in rose colored vestments to express the Church’s joyful expectation of the Lord’s imminent arrival. We anticipate the Lord not with fear and trembling but with steadfast joy. The Prophet Isaiah’s joy flows from his heart and soul: “I rejoice heartily in the Lord, in my God is the joy of my soul.” His joy is that of one sent to bear glad tidings to a people in darkness; an exultant energy, as Our Lady went in haste to bring Jesus to her cousin Elizabeth.

This Present Darkness

Next Sunday will be the darkest day of the year, the day before the Winter Solstice. There is no longer and colder night than December 21st. Christmas brightens the long winter of our earthly exile. In this month of December the Church celebrates feasts of light. On Monday we celebrated the Immaculate Conception, the “white dawn announcing the Son’s rising.” Yesterday it was St. Lucy, a child martyr of the 3rd century whose names means light (Lucy from “lux”), and whose radiant joy overcame the hatred of her executioners. In ten days we celebrate the greatest of all Festivals of Light, the star of Bethlehem, the radiance of angels over nighttime flocks, the Solemnity of Christmas. “O that birth forever blessed,” writes Aurelius Prudentius in his 4th century hymn. “When the Virgin, full of grace, Overshadowed by the Spirit, Bore the Savior of our Race.” It is by virtue of His birth that St. Paul can command us in the Epistle to “rejoice always.”

Anyone can rejoice in every circumstance if he knows that God is with him, because joy is a virtue, not merely a feeling. Joy is an act of the will, sometimes difficult, but always possible to men of faith. We do not have to be sad, we do not have to be negative; we can choose to smile into the darkness, to sing while we work at even disagreeable tasks. “Rejoice always. Pray without ceasing. In all circumstances give thanks.” ‘Always’ because God is with us in every circumstance. Joy is a virtue that becomes less difficult and more perfect with practice.

“Make Straight the Path”

In the Gospel, John is baptizing at the River Jordan, and some priests ask him: who are you? He tells them that he is not the Messiah, but a voice in the desert crying out “make straight the way of the Lord.” The sad and lonely desert, the dangerous and frightening wilderness, is spreading. Senselessness, perhaps guided by calculated demonic fury, is undermining the once solid foundations of an earlier Christian era. Two years ago today a young man drove up to Sandy Hook Elementary School and shot 20 children. Two days ago a 22-year-old man opened fire at Rosemary Anderson School in Oregon. School shootings are relatively common now, but unknown just a generation ago. What has changed? Well, we can hardly expect people not to kill children when our government subsidizes child murder under another name. Not 20 children but 20,000 children die every day in this world through government-subsidized abortion.

It is always darkest before dawn. We cannot lift the darkness—only God can save our world—but we can make straight the path. It is the joyful penances of Advent, our spiritual preparation, that make Christmas the most joyful season of the year. Take those spiritual practices away, and Christmas loses its joy. It becomes just another commercial event, driven by blind market forces.

“Joy is prayer - Joy is strength - Joy is love - Joy is a net of love by which you catch souls,” wrote Mother Teresa. If you pray, you will be joyful, because you will see light in even the deepest darkness. Go to Mass every week, every day if possible, and bring your friends. Make a good confession, schedule in a weekly holy hour, pray the rosary, and you will radiate the light of a joyful Christian. “Pow’rs, dominions bow before him, the babe, the world’s redeemer,” wrote Aurelius Prudentius 1600 years ago. “Now he shines, the long expected. Let creation praise its Lord.”

The Immaculate Conception

I made up a nice little Advent quiz for all of you today—just three questions.

Question One: Tomorrow is a “holy day of _________.”

Question Two: Tomorrow, December 8, is the Feast of the ____________.

Question Three: The Immaculate Conception refers to whom?

The White Dawn

Why does the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception occur in the middle of Advent? Because Mary’s Immaculate Conception was the prelude to the Incarnation, the necessary preparation for the baby Jesus. It was fitting that God first prepare an immaculate mother for His Son by preserving her body and soul from the decay of original sin. Mary is the “white dawn” that announces the rising of God’s Son. Have you ever passed a very bad night, longing for that first bit of light in the eastern sky? The dawn assures us that the night will not last forever. So in Isaiah Chapter 40, the “Book of Consolation” is written for a people in their 40th year of exile, two generations in Babylonian slavery for their infidelities. “Comfort, give comfort to my people,” says Yahweh. “Speak tenderly to Jerusalem—her service (slavery) is at an end, her guilt expiated.” Indeed, she has paid double for her sins. It had seemed an endless exile, but Isaiah announces that God and man are now reconciled. “Cry out at the top of your voice these glad tidings: like a shepherd our God feeds and carries his people.”

Glad Tidings

The first words of Mark’s Gospel brings us these glad tidings: “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” In this first Gospel to be written, St. Mark is announcing something absolutely new. As Fr. Barron points out in his homily this week, the word “gospel” (in Greek “eu-angelion”) was the “good message” that the emperor would send ahead of him announcing a great military victory. Days before the people would see the emperor marching into Rome at the head of his victory parade, they would hear the heralds or “evangelists” galloping into the city, flags flying: “the emperor has won the victory! We are saved from the enemy!” In fact, one of the emperor’s titles was son of God, but Mark names Jesus Christ the “Son of God.” He is saying that no imperial victory, no good news, can compare with this good news, because Jesus is one and only Son of God and lover of men. These glad tidings are of a whole different order; they address the fundamental problem with our humanity. They grant true freedom.

Prepare

Advent is our annual retreat, our preparation for this king. He has won the victory, and He is on his way to enter San Francisco in triumph (He does that, actually, at every Mass in every Catholic church in this city). His heralds arrive ahead of him, and in today’s gospel it is not only St. Mark, but St. John the Baptist as well. “One mightier than I is coming…he will baptize you with fire,” So make straight his paths—fill up what is lacking in your hearts, and excavate what is burdensome in your bodies.

How to prepare? If all we do before Christmas this year is shop and eat, we will not be ready for such a King. Advent is a time of greater prayer and some measure of fasting, so let’s get at it. Here are three suggestions:

1. Pray the rosary once a week, with a view to praying it every day, as Our Lady at Fatima requested. Most Catholics use rosaries as rear view mirror ornaments, but let every Mass-going Catholic in this parish pray the rosary at least once a week. Advent 2014 is a good time to start.
2. Go to confession once a month. The people came to John “acknowledging their sins.” Let us do the same to prepare a heart fit for God’s Advent.
3. Make a significant gift to someone poorer than you. Christmas is meaningless unless we give sacrificially from our hearts. We need to feel the gift. Money is always nice, and we all know people who have less than we do. Time is good too—a listening ear, a heartfelt letter. 

Christmas—that is, Christ’s Mass—is near. I’m sure you all go to Mass on December 25. Please don’t go unprepared: Christmas comes only once a year.

Rain Down Upon Us

We are only three days from Christmas, and the readings and prayers bring us right to the edge of the mystery of the Incarnation. The introit of today’s Mass: Rorate cæli, désuper, et nubes pluant justum: aperiátur terra, et gérminet Salvatórem. “Drop down moisture, O ye Heavens, from above, and the clouds will rain down the Just One; the earth will open, and a Savior will spring up.” So the luminous Shekinah, the shining cloud of God’s presence, rained down grace from above, into the heart of the maiden of Nazareth, a heart which opened to the world on Christmas Day. When Mary said yes to the angel, and so conceived by the Holy Spirit, our salvation was accomplished. Her yes to God, the first time in human history that someone permitted God complete access to her heart and will, Mary’s yes to God began a new era, the time of grace, the New Covenant of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. The communion between God and Mary is the greatest of all mysteries, renewed each time we receive Holy Communion.

St. Paul describes Christians as the “Stewards of God’s Mysteries” in the Epistle. These “mysteries” are the Sacraments and their effects. Grace rains down constantly upon us from heaven, but the future of humanity depends on what we do with that grace. Do we squander it, toss it away, ignore it—or do we nurture it, keep it in our hearts, act upon it? Are we stewards of the mysteries, or wasters and squanderers?

Stewards of the Mysteries

The one thing necessary of a steward is that he be found faithful, writes St. Paul. He must be faithful to the gift entrusted to him. We receive the gift and mystery of the Holy Eucharist today. Are we faithful to that mystery? What do we do with what we have received? What did Our Lady do with what she received? She kept it in her heart, and she grew the grace, in obedience to God. God gave her a little baby, and she grew that baby into a man, into a Savior. Has God given you children? Grow them into saints. It is not enough that your children get all A’s in school, that they learn the piano and play soccer. You must do more than feed, clothe, and educate them. You must lead them to sanctity if you are to be a steward of the mysteries.

Has God given you employment? Grow that work into an apostolate, a means of conversion for those with whom you work. Your job must build the Kingdom of Christ, not just to put food on the table. Your work is to save souls. Imagine if every card-carrying Catholic in this country were faithful to the mysteries in their work and personal lives: if they used the sacraments and the Word of God to build a Civilization of Love rather than fabricate a culture of death. Imagine what our Catholic Vice President could do to protect human life, to strengthen marriage, and to increase goodness in our country. Imagine what the top Catholic business leaders, Catholic entertainment moguls, and Catholic university professors, could do with the faith they have been given. There are many who use their faith well—I read yesterday that Comedian Bob Newhart has backed out of a scheduled appearance before Legatus, a group of Catholic businessmen, under heavy pressure from militant homosexuals. That’s a good sign that these Catholic businessmen are taking their faith seriously and promoting the Gospel in the Public Square.

Just a Housewife

Most of us are not high-powered businessmen, or professors, or Supreme Court justices. But neither was Our Lady. She was a housewife, a simple woman who decided to trust God with her whole mind, her whole strength, her whole soul. She trusted God. What have you and I been given that needs to be surrendered to Him? What gift can you return to him this Christmas?  Your children? Your marriage? Your job? What parts of my life have I not submitted to his Lordship? Let us aspire to imitate Our Lady, and hold nothing back from him; to give what He takes, and take what He gives, with a big smile. Holy Mary, pray for us, that we may trust the Good God as you trusted him, and so bring him to birth again this Christmas.

Gaudete: Joy

Today, the Third Sunday of Advent, we call “Gaudete Sunday,” so called from the first word of the Introit or Entrance Antiphon for the Mass, which is also the Epistle Reading: Gaudete in Domino semper: iterum dico, gaudete “Rejoice in the Lord always: again I say it, Rejoice!... the Lord is near” (Phil 4:4). The priest and the altar clothe themselves in rose to indicate the joy of these last two weeks before Christmas.

Joy in the midst of tragedy
Last year we celebrated Guadete Sunday two days after the Sandy Hook school shooting, and now it has been a year. What will happen this year? In this month’s Magnificat magazine, the mother of one of the 20 children slaughtered at their desks writes of her daughter Catherine. Every time she hears the Lamb of God at Mass, “the wound that I think has started to heal is suddenly ripped open. Lambs are innocent, exposed, and vulnerable…” Catherine was a lamb to her mother and father, and she has been slain.

What tragedy and sadness will come upon us this year? Evil will certainly come upon us; joy will be turned into sadness, and yet St. Paul insists that we should have “no anxiety at all. The peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts.” Advent prepares us for Christmas, but Christmas prepares us the Parousia, the Second Coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. He came, and he will come again, he who will wipe every tear from our eyes. This absolute assurance relativizes every human anxiety and surpasses all human understanding. It guards our hearts.

“Make Straight the Path”

In the Gospel, John is baptizing at the Jordan River, and some priests come from Jerusalem to ask him: who are you? He tells them that he is not the Messiah, but he is a voice in the desert crying out “make straight the way of the Lord.” The sad and lonely desert, the dangerous and frightening wilderness, is spreading. Senselessness, perhaps guided by calculated Demonic fury, is undermining the once solid foundations of an earlier Christian era. But we can stem this tide: we can Make Straight the Path, as the Forerunner commands us. We can roll up our sleeves, tighten our belts, and get to work. It is the joyful penances of Advent, the spiritual preparation for the Nativity of Christ, that make Christmas the most joyful season of the year. Take those spiritual practices away, and Christmas loses its joy. It becomes just a market “season” without significance, driven by blind economic forces.

How do we make “Straight the Path?” We must pray. Those who take the trouble to pray regularly—who go to Mass and confession often, who study the Scriptures, who make serious retreats—these radiate a deep, consistent joy. These are free men and women, untroubled by the world’s violence.

After attending to our interior life, we must work towards straightening our American society out. First, we must confront the fact that we kill not twenty children (as did the Sandy Hook shooter) but twenty thousand children every day through abortion. We can hardly expect people not kill children when our government subsidizes child murder under another name. Second, we must clean up the entertainment industry: Our movies, television, and video games relentlessly soak our nation in blood lust and sexual perversion. Third, we must defend the Judeo-Christian principles on which our nation was established. Government schools have tutored our children in atheism for two generations, and most parents make no objection. Forty public schools have suffered killings since we banned school prayer. We can bring God and right reason back to into our schools, because we the people still have a say in how our government orders our lives together. We can make straight the path by calling sexual promiscuity, and particularly homosexual acts, what they are: crooked, unnatural, and injurious. We can do all this with confident joy and ardent charity toward those who oppose us, because we are offering them the word of Life, the source and foundation of all true joy.

Cause of our Joy

Our Lady, the Immaculate Heart of Mary, is the Cause of our Joy. If we are to make straight the path, we must do it with her and under her direction. In the face of ridicule, she is invincible. In the face of demonic rage, she is unassailable. All true joy comes through her, and through her we bring Joy himself, her son Jesus Christ, to the world.

The Day of Judgment

This first stage of Advent, from Dec 1-16, prepares us not for Christmas but for Jesus’ Second Coming and his Final Judgment. The readings and the prayers say nothing about a baby in Bethlehem; they speak rather of justice will be meted out to the wicked and mercy to the righteous. We’re not talking sleigh bells and Christmas trees but apocalyptic judgment and a world remade in the image of God. The prayer over the gifts, for example: “O Lord, since we have no merits to plead our cause, come, we pray, to our rescue…” And the Preface: “We watch for that day to inherit the great promise in which we now dare to hope.” The first reading: “Not by appearance shall he judge: he shall strike the ruthless with the rod of his mouth and slay the wicked.” And the Gospel: “Repent, …you brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? Even now the ax lies at the root.” Trees that bear no fruit will be cut down and thrown into fire.

Certainly everyone fears judgment. Even in our “enlightened” and “liberated” society, or perhaps especially among people that ignore the existence of a Divine Authority, people sense that man’s injustice cannot go on forever. But if God is not my judge, then no one is my judge. So people avoid judgment in cases of obvious wrongdoing—they hire lawyers to contest simple traffic tickets and insist on their innocence in cases of even grave crime. You just need the right lawyer—remember the OJ Simpson case, or the many corporate fraud cases such as Enron and Worldcom. “I did nothing wrong” insisted President Clinton in the Monica Lewinski affair. You will hear people say “I left the Church because it is so judgmental.” “No one can impose their morality on me.” We all pretend that somehow we will escape judgment, and many go so far as to pretend that God and natural law do not even exist. But as one of my seminary professors said, “you can’t break the natural law; you can only break against the natural law.”

The Winnowing Fan

Advent, like Lent, is a season to prepare for the coming of Christ by confessing, and submitting to, his divine judgment. That judgment is fearsome, for it submits itself to no human appeal. That judgment is also our only hope, for it decisively corrects human error. There will come a day, the last of human history, when God will right this tilting ship. There will come a time when the wolf will be the guest of the lamb, and the child will play by the cobra’s den—when children will play next to buildings that were once abortion clinics.  There will come a day when “the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the Lord, as the water covers the sea.” That day will surely come, for God has promised it, and his promises are sure. But it will come only after the judgment, because divine mercy comes to us only through divine justice. Is Jesus a meek and mild baby in the lap of his maiden mother, Mary, or is Jesus a terrifying Judge coming on the clouds with fearsome power? He is both: for the faithful, Christ’s judgment is mercy; for the unfaithful, his judgment is swift and terrible justice.

We will all be threshed

“All Judea and the whole region” were rushing to John the Baptist by the River as they “acknowledged their sins.” God’s judgment is a threshing, a separation: he will separate wheat from chaff. The chaff he will burn and the wheat he will gather to himself, into his barn (heaven). John asserts that “His winnowing fan is in his hand….” A winnowing fan was a pitchfork that a farmer used to toss the mixture of wheat and chaff into the air, so that the wind could blow away the chaff while the heavier grain would fall to earth. It is said that a friend is one who separates wheat from chaff in the one he loves. And yet this separation, while a necessary dynamic of friendship painfully shakes us up.

God threshes every man, shaking out our sins like a man shakes out a dirty rug. He is doing that already, for purgatory begins now, in this life. Let God thresh and winnow you. “Take what he gives, and give what he takes, with a big smile,” in the words of Mother Teresa. A saint is simply one who submits herself to the threshing judgment of God, who does not resist when she is tossed about by divine providence, who allows herself to be purified of her chaff. Trust the Lord’s threshing of your life, for He knows what he is about.

The Immaculate Conception

Today is the patronal feast of our Nation, the Immaculate Conception, although we will celebrate it tomorrow so as not to displace a Sunday. Our Lady is the only daughter of men that did not need to be threshed, because she had no sin. And yet God did thresh her: he led her through trial, sorrow, confusion, and darkness. Like Jesus, she experienced the full weight of sin’s consequences, even though herself without sin. If even she patiently underwent this threshing, cannot we also patiently accept God’s disciplines in our lives? With her, we gladly offer difficulties, aches and pains, perplexities, weaknesses, and darkness. We allow God to winnow us, so that we may be gathered into his heaven with the Immaculata and all the saints, for he is the judge, the just judge, living and reigning forever and ever. Amen.

Advent looks forward, not backward

We have entered the Season of Advent and most of us are thinking of Christmas; in fact, I began my Christmas cards yesterday. But Advent is not about Christmas, at least in the Extraordinary Form readings; it’s about Christ’s Second Coming. The Epistle today clearly warns us to prepare ourselves, and the Gospel foretells a terrifying end of the world. The next three Sundays of Advent are less apocalyptic but no less focused on the Second Coming. They say nothing about the birth of the baby Jesus, nor do we hear any Messianic prophecies, as in the Ordinary Form readings. Advent, at least in the Extraordinary Form, is meant to focus us on the Second Coming of Christ, not his First Coming. What if Christ were to return to earth during this “Holiday Season.” Would we be ready for him? Would the world, which has removed the very name of Christ from Christmas, be ready for him? Here he comes, and there we are, waiting in line at Macy’s, or fuming with road rage on the way to the mall. If Christ knocked on your door an hour before your big Christmas party, would you let him in? “Honey, tell whoever it is to come back next week—I’ve got so much to do before the guests arrive!” I’m not forbidding Christmas parties, but let’s try to keep Advent in focus. Our priority during Advent, and Christmas, is not social fun, but prayer and Christian love and almsgiving, some measure of penance. Our Christmas parties and shopping and tinsel are fine, if we keep them within the authentic purpose of the liturgical season. The coming Kingdom of Jesus Christ is the guiding purpose of Advent.

People will die of fright

On the First Sunday of Advent, as I said, we hear of confusion and terror: the sea and the waves will roar; the powers of the heavens will be shaken. “Nations will be in dismay; people will die of fright in anticipation of what is coming.” It is for these days that we must prepare, because they will surely come. At His First Coming, God came as a darling baby on the lap of his childlike mother Mary. At His Second Coming, Christ will come on the clouds with power and great glory, his authority fully manifest. “When these things begin to pass, look up, because your redemption is at hand.” We are preparing for our redemption, for we are not yet redeemed—it is “at hand,” it is near, but not yet here. God’s judgment on our lives, His sentence on our time, has yet to come. Everyone in this church today (especially me) could end up in hell, and it would be an unspeakable tragedy if even one of us were eternally damned. Advent calls us to keep this danger in mind during our Christmas parties and shopping adventures, but also to keep in mind the proximity of our redemption. Now is the time to prepare for judgment; now is the time to hope for redemption.

Prepare

How do we keep a good Advent? Many Americans begin the “Christmas Season” with the new civic holiday we call “Black Friday.” The very name indicates a culture that was once Christian but has become the negative image of what it once was. Children of the light, St. Paul says, “throw off works of darkness.” If we’ve thrown Christ out of Christmas, then indeed it is a “Black Friday.” Do we prepare for Christ by eating and drinking? Again, St. Paul: “not in orgies and drunkenness, rather, make no provision for the desires of the flesh.” Folks, we are supposed to lose weight in this season, at least before December 25. But we do live in a time that ignores and despises the Word of God. Yet everything but the Word of God will burn in the universal fires at the end of human history.

There is a true Advent, and there is a false Advent. The false is the negative image of the true. The true Advent has gradually been turned upside down, and we don’t often stop to think about it. Christians are to practice deeper prayer, charity, and mortification in the weeks leading up to Christmas. Funny thing is, we mostly do just the opposite. We pray less and we eat more. We waste more money at Christmas on more banalities, precisely at the time the Church urges us to simplify, to spend less time and money on distractions. Let’s try to refocus, to direct that time and money this time of year on the things that last: on deeper prayer, on sacrificial and heartfelt charity. Advent is a time to remember the neediest, to give gifts without expecting a return.

Our Lady

In the end, Advent prepares us for our own death, and the death of our world as we know it. Deep down, we long for the death of all that is imperfect and sinful, so that we can enter into a new and perfect life. Death is hard, and more than anyone, we need our Blessed Mother at the hour of our death. Our mother brings us to birth, and God has ordained that she be with us at the hour of our death. If Advent points us to the end of all things and the beginning of a new Kingdom, then Our Lady must be a large part of Advent and Christmas. And indeed she is, on almost every Christmas card and still (Deo Gratias) on US Postal stamps. Even as we shop and have parties and write cards, let us bring Jesus and Mary to every Advent activity—a decade of the rosary or the Angelus and some real Christmas carols at every Christmas party—so that we will be prepared to meet Christ when he returns to earth.