The season of Advent

By Fr. Roy Cimagala

 

WE have to learn to live the season of Advent properly. To do so, we have to know what Advent is really all about, and what our duties and responsibilities are toward it. We have to overcome our tendency to take these things for granted, just going through the motions of doing what more or less is expected of us in this period of the liturgical year.

Since Advent is the beginning of another liturgical year, we have to understand then that this season implies that we have to learn how to begin again well in the context of the liturgy. What is presumed is that we have a global picture of our life.

We ought to know the different constitutive elements of our life here on earth as well as their relations among each other. We have to distinguish as well as relate the different dimensions of our life, like the material and the spiritual, the temporal and the eternal, the natural and the supernatural, the mundane and the sacred, the theory and the praxis, piety and morals, work and prayer, etc.

With Advent, we are reminded that it is Christ who enables us to get this global picture, since he is the very pattern of God’s creation, and especially of us, as well as our savior after we messed up God’s original creation through our sin. And in the liturgy, especially in the Holy Eucharist, we have Christ directly intervening in our lives, both personally and collectively.

Advent tries to arouse in us this longing for Christ who should not be just a historical character buried in the past. He is God who lives in eternity and thus is also living even up to now. He is always a contemporary of everyone of us, irrespective of what era we pass through this world.

This is a truth of our faith, a spiritual and supernatural reality that we have to learn how to be aware of constantly and how to correspond to properly. We have to come up with certain practices to make this awareness a living reality every day.

Aside from arousing in us a longing for Christ whose birth we will celebrate this Christmas and whose second coming we should be expecting at the end of time, Advent should also arouse in us a sense of nostalgia in the sense that we be aware that we come from God, that we begin our life with him.

We have to understand that our life here on earth is just a test, to see if what God wants of us is also what we want for ourselves. And the test is in the way we handle our earthly conditions. For this, God has already given us the means and the power, but it is up to us to take them up or not.

To be sure, God has given us his very own Son, Jesus Christ, who is made alive in us through the Holy Spirit, and actualized through the many means and instrumentalities made available in the Church. We have no reason to be afraid, nor to worry, nor to think that our life is just one aimless venture that can be engaged just in any way we want.

It’s important that the awareness of God as our beginning and end, with Christ as the way, truth and life, is always vivid in us!

Email: roycimagala@gmail.com