Advent and Penitence, Past and Present

Is Advent a penitential season? Yes, it is. No, it isn’t. Well, maybe it ought to be again. The answer you get depends, I suspect, on your source’s general attitude toward the past. For the ChurchPOP Editor, for example, the questions of whether Advent should be considered a penitential season or whether such seasons have any spiritual value seem to be purely academic. It was once; now, it isn’t. So there. Move along, people, nothing to see here. To some people, the only relevant fact about the past is that it has passed.

Living in the Wake of the Past

But past and present aren’t so easily divorced. In the real world, the past affects us, even shapes our lives, on both the social and individual levels. Saint Paul died almost 1,960 years ago, yet his life and actions still influence us today. We still feel the effects of the Council of Jerusalem, never mind Vatican II. We still live in the wakes of the Edict of Milan and the Diet of Worms. Strangely, St. Pius X’s suppression of modernism gave birth to the ressourcement of nouvelle theologie (so hated by traditionalists) and the hermeneutic of continuity.

The past doesn’t stop being influential merely because we stop studying it.

The culmination of Advent is the Nativity of Christ. It was demanded by the economy of our salvation: For the Passion and Resurrection to have their full effect, there had to be an Incarnation and Nativity. And it happened not only at a place we can locate on a modern map but at a time roughly datable by contemporary non-Christian records, among a people who for several centuries had had a literary tradition as well as an oral tradition. This isn’t just history but a breaking into history, an invasion of the ephemeral by the eternal.

Past, present, and future intersecting in Bethlehem .. though not necessarily in a stable.

Trapped by the Past

To be a sinner is to be trapped by your past. Like Macbeth, you feel you’re so far into a river of sin that “returning were as tedious as cross o’er.” Or perhaps it’s Pride that keeps you doubling down on a losing bet, that keeps you doing the same thing in expectation of a different result. Whatever justified your original departure from righteousness continues to justify it long after you recognize that it’s made your life more miserable. You rationalize, even normalize your sins as longtime prisoners normalize prison life, learning to despise good people, conflating innocence with ignorance.

As John Grondelski put it:

To understand Advent requires understanding Christmas. Cur Deus homo? as St. Anselm once asked: why did God become man? The answer is simple. We proclaim it every week in the Creed: “for us men and for our salvation he came down from heaven.” He came because we needed him to be saved. (Bold type = italics in source)

We needed him to be saved. To those who wondered why he hung around with the dregs of Judean society, Jesus responded, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick” (Matthew 9:12; Mark 2:17; Luke 5:31). Imagine the director of an elite golf club who helped poor people become rich enough to join the club. Or a MENSA-like organization devoted to helping low-IQ people develop their mental skills. Jesus didn’t come to confirm the righteous in their exclusivity, but rather to bring more souls into the “club” of righteousness.

Chronological Snobbery

Modern Western society labors under several errors and delusions about the past that I consider part of our myth of Progress. One is the general assumption that our ancestors were wrong about everything; or at least, everything that matters. Believing anything they said to be true would supposedly require reconstructing their society down to horse- or ox-drawn plows, monarchies, bad sanitation, and slavery. Our ideas must be better because we have better sanitation, better medicines, cars and computers and satellites and smartphones. No, our ancestors were too stupid to know how backward, miserable, and oppressed they were.

Our contempt for our past is of the same character as the contempt of the civilized for the barbarian, the condescension of the intellectual elite toward the uneducated masses, the disdain of the aesthete for the common or popular. It is, in fact, the contempt of the Pharisee for the tax collector. Saint Teresa of Calcutta reportedly said, “If you judge people, you have no time to love them.” In truth, you don’t begin to understand them, let alone have compassion for them. You labor under the delusion that you have nothing in common with them.

Our past still binds us because, while our knowledge and technology may have evolved, we have not. We are all the children of Adam and Eve, and we live and die with the consequences of their original sin. Human nature remains constant through the many changes from the Stone Age to the Information Age, across shifting cultural, linguistic, and political borders. If it’s proper for the poor to criticize the rich or the commoner to criticize the aristocrat, it’s proper for our ancestors in the faith to criticize their successors.

The person who thinks the past has nothing to say to the present is not merely guilty of chronological snobbery. They have effectively (if unwittingly) committed apostasy. For what is the Church’s mission, if not to carry the past into the present until Christ returns? Why teach disciples of all nations to obey everything Christ commanded (Matthew 28:19-20) if what he said in the first century has no bearing on the twenty-first? What is the Eucharist except a present participation in a Passion which took place in the remote past? For what reason, then, are we celebrating Christ’s birth?

Bringing Penitence Back to Advent

Advent, the General Instruction of the Roman Missal explains, is a period of “devout and joyful expectation.” Does that contradict penance? Not at all! Hope is wasted on the person who is convinced of their damnation, who goes to their doom without a single appeal to a higher court. Those who don’t repent are either arrogant in their conviction of sinlessness or hopeless in their conviction of abandonment. Christ’s birth is our confirmation that we have not, after all, been left to languish in our misery, that God has granted our petitions for forgiveness even before we make them.

It’s fitting, then, to prepare for the birth of the Savior by reminding ourselves of our need for salvation. The Eastern Orthodox and Catholic Churches begin their preparations even before Advent begins, with “Philip’s Fast,” which runs from Nov. 15 to Dec. 24. The Advent Ember Days are the Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday after Gaudete Sunday (or the Memorial of St. Lucy in the pre-Vatican II tradition): special days of fasting and half-abstinence (only one meal with meat) on Wednesday and Saturday, fasting and full abstinence on Friday. We could also return to meatless Fridays, beginning the day after Thanksgiving.

The “trinity” of penance includes fasting, prayer, and almsgiving. Advent and Christmas are hard on the poor, especially in the northern latitudes where the days grow shorter and the nights colder. Make a habit of carrying some cash with you in case random opportunities to give present themselves. If your political conscience balks at putting money in the red bucket, you can donate to local Catholic outreach missions (such as The Junction in Denton, Texas, which my Knights of Columbus council supports). Don’t just give of your treasure, though; give of your time and talent as well.

As for prayer: Try praying one of the seven penitential psalms every day from Nov. 27 to Dec. 24. Catholic Online has some penitential prayers, including a dozen Acts of Contrition, as well as an Act of Sorrow, St. Augustine’s Penitential Prayer, and a Special Act of Sorrow. The Memorare seeks the intercession of the Blessed Mother; the phrase, “before thee I stand, sinful and sorrowful,” recalls the Salve Regina’s “poor, banished children of Eve … mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.” Finally, abstaining and even fasting on Fridays gives special weight to praying the Sorrowful Mysteries.

Conclusion

The real question, then, isn’t whether Advent is a penitential season but whether we ought to prepare for the joy of Christmas through penitential practices during Advent. To this question, the answer ought to be “Yes.” We don’t need a change in canon law or our bishops’ encouragement to do it, either (though it would be nice if the bishops led from the front on this matter). Nor do we need to reconstruct our society to fit some dystopian narrative of medieval Europe or Dickens’ London. We need only the will and the right frame of mind.

The whole point of traditions is to teach us lessons from the past. We pass on lessons from the past so we don’t have to rediscover fire or reinvent the wheel every two or three generations. The whole point of the apostolic tradition is to keep us in continuity with our ancestors in the faith. The Church is always in need of reform, but the faith does not need reinvention. It could, however, use some rediscovery. Advent is the beginning of our year. Let’s begin it in the spirit of repentance.