Nourishment

Ah, Lent. Spiritual house cleaning is upon us once again, and it feels due. Part of my Lenten practice this year is to pray the morning and evening prayers of the Liturgy of the Hours. This is an attempt to create a better balance of something I've been marveling at recently; how much time I spend nourishing the body, and how little time I spend nourishing my soul.

I'm amazed by the hours I spend every week on grocery shopping, preparing meals, and cleaning up after them. I go to the dentist, take my kids to the doctor. I clean the house. I highlight my hair, brush my teeth, put on makeup. I run and take walks, throw in a few yoga poses here and there just to get my body through the day. It really is remarkable. And how much time do I spend praying, reading Scripture, attending Mass? Very little, especially considering that my body will wither and die, but my soul is eternal.

I never find myself too busy to eat for an entire day, but I do find myself convinced I'm too busy and too tired to pray--why is that?!

Unwrapping Liturgical Time

I've been pondering why living in Liturgical Time feels like such a blessed addition to my life, and I think it's partly because, in order to appreciate the way things are, we have to understand the way they have been. Following the Liturgical calendar unfolds the story of salvation throughout the year, so there are times when we 'live' an event that has came and gone long ago--the annunciation, the birth of Christ, his passion, his resurrection. All Christians celebrate the resurrection, since it is central to being Christian and is the reality we live, but I haven't seen a universal value as strong as the Catholic one on celebrating the events leading up to the resurrection. One could ask, why would I drag myself through the muck, so to speak, of focusing on the agony of Jesus' death, when he has triumphed over death (his, and ours) once and for all? Some are offended at the re-creation of Christ's paschal sacrifice during the Mass. It may seem morbid, distasteful, or just altogether too solemn for Christians to celebrate every week, who are supposed to be, overall, joyful people.



But there is something about participating weekly in Christ's sacrifice that keeps the central act Christ has done for us close to the heart, and I think living Liturgical Time has the same effect. We are reminded of all Christ has done..."the kingdom of God enters into our time." (Catechism of the Catholic Church 1168). I have found that as a Catholic, I feel more joyful on Easter Sunday because I have spent Lent in mourning. There has been physical solemness in my life as I have tried to be more spiritually disciplined, penitential, and focused on imitating Christ's total surrender long ago. Reliving the way things were facilitates a true celebration of the way things are when Easter finally comes. Furthermore, I am enabled to celebrate an entire Easter season rather than one single day because I find I enjoy the fruits of my Lenten penance especially during Easter season since they are so fresh. I have grown closer to God, and have more reason to actually be able to think of myself as living an Easter season.



In addition, Liturgical time mirrors reality, anticipating the future as well as looking to the past. By living a well-rounded year of spiritual seasons, we are reminded that the nature of life is always thus--full of ups and downs. For each individual, the final chapters of our own salvation stories have not been written. Who knows what the future holds for each of us--while we can have confidence that we will be with Christ and his Church victorious in heaven when we die, we have no way of knowing what pain and trials we will have to endure in order to get there. We are told to be imitators of Christ, granted on a mini-scale since we are not offering life to others from within us. But we are all called to take up our cross, the die to ourselves, and ultimately to physically die and rise again in Christ. There is no comfort zone we can relax in as Christians, expecting to have an easy life of happy blessings continuously raining down from heaven --our life is simply not our own. Liturgical time helps keep the tendency to believe this isn't so at bay, just because each month is not our own. We are following the Church calendar, and when it says to fast, we fast, despite any inconvenience that may come from conflicts with our personal life (within reason).



I was reading about the Liturgy of the Hours in the Catechism, and came across this passage describing its purpose, which I think also applies to the Liturgical Calendar, "This celebration, faithful to the apostolic exhortations to "pray constantly," is "so devised that the whole course of the day and night is made holy by the praise of God." (CCC 1174). We have a Catholic calendar on the wall next to the computer, and I am often struck by how different it feels to have a calendar full of religious dates, and to pencil in Holy Days of obligation on our other calendar. It's still very novel to me, religious time overlapping with dentist appointments and play dates. It's a really good thing, this mingling of holy time with the everyday. I'm glad I discovered it.

Essential Lent

This Lent, I've been reflecting on Jesus' answer to the Pharisee who asked what the greatest commandment is. Jesus answered, "...love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself" (Matt. 22). Observing Lent has a tendency to boil life down to what is spiritually essential, and I love the simplicity of Jesus' teaching here; the main goal of life is to accomplish two things, loving God and loving man. But the simplicity can be deceitful. It's a really, really difficult commandment to follow, and to do well requires a tremendous amount of sacrifice. If that doesn't register with you, go ahead, try to give over one entire day to loving God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and to treating everyone around you exactly as you wish to be treated. It's possible it might be easy for a day or two. You might hit one of those days where you get such a good night's sleep that you wake up early to pray, the kids are at grandma's, there are no homeless men standing outside your window at long red lights, and your husband volunteers to clean the kitchen after dinner. But those days are flukes. It won't be easy the next day, or the day after that when you spend your whole day exhausted and positively certain the universe is set up to demand you satisfy the wants and needs of others as long as they directly contradict with your own wants and needs.

It's a given that we can't follow Jesus' command to the letter, otherwise we wouldn't need him--we would already be perfect. So I can't help but wonder, how much loving God counts as loving God with all my heart? Can I love him just a little in the morning, not at all in the afternoon, but make it up in the evening? I'm not really prepared to answer that question, but as I've been thinking about the answer over Lent, it has occurred to me that this is why we need to observe Lent--because we are really bad at loving God and our neighbor completely with every deed and word when it requires personal sacrifice. We need times of penance such as Lent to train ourselves to love and obey God all the time.

The fact is, loving God and humanity is so often a discipline, and not something that just comes naturally from an inner ever-flowing spring of affection. You have to make yourself do it, and what is Lent but practicing making yourself do (or not do) something? Jesus likes to compare his relationship with his church to a marriage, and in marriage, you don't constantly feel enamored with your spouse; you often have to choose to love them with actions that are a personal sacrifice. It can seem pointless to deny ourselves whatever small pleasure in life we've decided to give up during Lent. It's so tempting to negate the value of giving up sugar, or movies, or whatever, and think 'oh, but what Jesus wants is my heart, not this arbitrary sacrifice, and he has my heart already...so I'll just skip the penance thing'. But sacrifice is an essential discipline in following Jesus, and I think Lent trains us towards a sacrificial lifestyle. So much of loving God and fellow human beings really goes against our nature- we tend to love when it's convenient. Lent is inconvenient, and I think if we give up some of our personal vices and pleasures with the idea that we will be molded into a closer likeness of Jesus, God will honor our choices and give us what we desire.

12th day of Christmas

It's the last day of Christmas. Did I find ways to celebrate a full 12 days of Christmas? No, but I thought it might make me feel a little better to at least point out that we're on the 12th day of Christmas. So, friends, if you have any eggnog in the fridge, drink up. And there's always next year, Lord willing...

Easter & Christmas go together

I'm still hung up on Advent, I can't stop thinking about it. What I've been mulling over lately is the connection between Easter and Christmas.

Christmas isn't truly significant if we don't believe in the death and resurrection of Christ, which we celebrate on Easter. If we don't believe Christ gave himself up for us on the cross to save us from eternal separation from him, otherwise known as hell, then his birth is nothing more than a quaint story. Secular culture tries to make Christmas important by gift-giving and eating and getting together with friends and family, but the reason to do these things are dictated by a mere date on the calendar, as well as tradition. No, Christmas doesn't really make sense unless we believe in Easter.

The thing that has really been sinking in is that because of these reasons, Christmas is not the highest holy day of the Liturgical year-- Easter is. Christmas is only the beginning of the greatest story ever told....Easter is the end of it, the grand finale in which God fully reveals himself to us.

But Christmas gets all the attention! And I don't know what to do about it, exactly. Shall I deflate my 'Christmas spirit' in the name of being Christlike? Christmas has always been the big deal holiday, the only one that's so important I will get on an airplane to be with family. This isn't a bad thing, is it? But what do I do at Easter to celebrate that compares?

I'm grateful that I have experienced Easter as a Catholic, because Easter was profoundly different for me this year having observed Lent before hand. Easter didn't suddenly appear unannounced, I had been preparing for it for 40 days. Instead of coaxing some joy out of myself over Christ's resurrection, I couldn't help but feeling joyful. I wanted to throw a big party on Easter. It felt wrong not to.

I've been thinking of Advent as a mini-Lent, but it doesn't feel remotely the same. There are no jangly commercials to make me desperate for a remote with a mute button during Lent, there is nothing on my 'to do' list save 'get right with God', there is no planned overeating. Lent makes me think of a clean chalkboard, and December a cork board overflowing with push-pins and papers. These invasions are not Advent itself, but they make Advent harder to observe. So shall I dispense with them all? Shall I never throw a Christmas party? Not set foot in the mall?

I'm just looking for some balance here - a way to make the secular embellishments of Christmas more toned-down so I can sit down and have time to ponder my position relative to God. I don't want to go so far as to say that Christmas should be strictly celebrated at Church and in the heart, because it is a day worthy of rejoicing, and part of that is adding our human embellishments - feasting, visiting, a little extravagance here and there. That's just the way we do things on planet earth, and I think God understands...and perhaps there should be some more of that at my house on Easter.

I guess all I can say at this point is that I am really, really looking forward to Lent and Easter. This mini-Lent of Advent is making me crave the real thing.

If you have any thoughts or ideas on how to properly celebrate Advent, Christmas, or Easter, please share them!

Looking for Advent

I've been scrambling to understand Advent this year because the Catholic Church celebrates it differently than what I've been exposed to...and secular culture provides absolutely no clues on how to live the Advent season. This is my second Advent as a Catholic, but I don't know where my head was last year. I remember my husband telling me that Advent was a season of penance, but I didn't really understand. All my ideas of Christmas were joyful ones--'penitential' had not entered my consciousness.

I've been doing research online on Advent, but where better to answer my questions than the Catechism? "When the Church celebrates the liturgy of Advent each year, she makes present this ancient expectancy of the Messiah, for by sharing in the long preparation for the Saviour's first coming, the faithful renew their ardent desire for his second coming. By celebrating the precursor's birth and martyrdom, the Church unites herself to his desire: "He must increase, but I must decrease." (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 525)

Of course Advent is a season of penance, then: whenever I anticipate Jesus' second coming, I am humbled because I fear I am not ready to meet him face to face... or at least as ready as I'd like to be. The other thing that has been made clear to me is that Advent is NOT the 'Christmas season'. Traditionally, Christmas starts on Dec. 25th and goes until Epiphany on Jan. 6th. Yes, Christmas is celebrated for 12 days! But not until it's actually Christmas. I've noticed that Catholic churches usually do not decorate their sanctuaries until the 3rd Sunday in Advent (which is a joyful day), or they wait until Christmas Eve. Now I understand. How am I supposed to be in penitential mode when everything has a strictly festive air?

Most American Christians seem to have lost the tradition of Advent being a time of penance; instead 'anticipation' of Christmas is stressed during Advent, or it isn't celebrated at all. So it's been a little hard to find out what Advent has meant traditionally, but I want to understand it because Advent is a liturgical season and I have loved living by the liturgical calendar since I became Catholic. To me, the liturgical calendar beautifully unfolds the drama of the story of God's love for man each year. The Catechism says "...the Church, especially during Advent and Lent and above all at the Easter Vigil, re-reads and re-lives the great events of salvation history in the "today" of her liturgy"(CCC 1195). Doing this carves out specific ways to participate in the 'history' of salvation. There are times dedicated to fasting and self-examination, there are times of joyful celebration. Living by the liturgical calendar is a wonderful way to be deliberate about living a well-rounded spirituality, and Advent is a part of this.










I

It's Advent

I've been wondering lately how to impress upon booga bear a sense of excitement over Christmas apart from presents and cookies. I want him to understand that Christmas is primarily a celebration of God coming to earth in the form of baby Jesus. I want him to understand that the good things we celebrate at Christmas - family, peace, abundance- are not honored on a whim, but would not be so apart from God.

I have a few basic ideas, but nothing spectacular on how to impart wonder over the miracle of Jesus' birth; celebrating Advent at home, reading the Christmas story from the Bible, giving just a few gifts, etc. I hope that by trying to be intentional each year, the message will be sent. Kids are sponges, imitating what they see being done around them, so I guess a big part of it will just be making sure my own attitudes about Christmas are ones I would be proud to see in my child. I need to make sure that I'm excited about gift-giving over gift-getting, that I treat Advent as a time to spiritually prepare for Christmas, and that I myself am behaving in a way that honors Jesus' birth.

Having kids is certainly a good reality check.