Happy Thanksgiving to everyone! I hope that everyone had a blessed day. Here at the parish we had the Mass at 9:00am. After the Mass we had our traditional blessing and handing out of bread for families. Last Saturday (November 19th) we had a pasta dinner to raise funds for Odin Mello. He is a 1 year old who suffered life threatening trauma after being attacked. The money will go to help defer ongoing medical costs. Thank you to our Knights and to everyone who participated in this fundraiser!
This weekend we begin the Season of Advent! Last weekend we celebrated the solemnity of Christ the King of the universe. It marked the end of the liturgical year. During the liturgical year we journeyed with Our Lord from his birth through his ministry, passion, death, resurrection, and into the growth of the Church and the spread of the Gospel to all the nations. Now we once again start at the beginning and enter the season of Advent with all its many symbols and meanings. As my schola teacher often repeated to us: “repetition is the mother of memory.” The Church has us repeat the seasons to memorize the saving truths of our faith.
The essential meaning of the season may be encapsulated by the terms anticipation or waiting. We anticipate the coming of the Messiah, the Lord, the return of the King. The term “advent” means “coming” and involves four weeks of preparation. We await two comings of Christ: (1) His Second Coming when he will judge the living and the dead at the end of time, (2) and we relive the period before Christ coming in the flesh in Bethlehem 2000 years ago. Before Christ the world was in darkness, enslaved to the forces of sin and death.
The color of the season is purple like the season of Lent, albeit the purple of Advent is darker and has more of a blueish hue to it. St. John the Baptist gives us a reason for the color purple when he quotes Isaiah: “A voice of one crying out in the desert: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths.’” Our paths are prepared and made straight by acts of repentance and conversion. Hence, similar to Lent, the season of Advent is meant to be a season of repentance and conversion to prepare for the coming of the Lord.
Living in the northern hemisphere the days get shorter while the darkness gets longer. The Advent wreath helps us to symbolically experience the darkness of the world without Christ. As we light the individual candle with each passing Sunday the darkness retreats because the light of the world is coming.
The new liturgical year reminds us that God gives us the seasons to help us. They satisfy those two seemingly contradictory needs in us: a need for change and a need for permanence. We get tired of the same thing, but no one wants constant change. So, God gave us the seasons: Each season different yet every year the same. The same is true in the Church: the beautiful mixture of change and permanence. The season of Christmas gives way to the Season of Lent and Easter. Happy Advent to everyone.