Slow down and listen to the voice of the Lord

Today is the feast of Christ the King-which means that it is the 34th and final Sunday of Ordinary Time, and the beginning of the last week of the liturgical year-one Year of Grace is coming to an end as another will begin next week with the first Vespers of Advent next Saturday night. As I posited here last year close to this time, the Scripture readings from the Lectionary each day during this time of the year take on a very different feeling than what we might hear the rest of the year, because many of the texts we hear at Mass and even during Matins (the Office of Readings) or that we might read in the texts for an extended vigil for Matins take on a heightened eschatological and apocalyptic character-they speak rather freely, it often seems, of the consummation of all things and of the End of Days. This apocalyptic theme seems to carry even into the first week of Advent-which is always a time of both hope and expectation, as we prepare to commemorate the first coming of the Messiah as a baby in a feeding trough for farm animals while awaiting the second and final coming of the Messiah in power and glory "and all his angels with him." (Matthew 25:31)

We have just passed Thanksgiving in the United States, and for us this is now the beginning of what I have come to call the "secular holiday season." I can't justifiably call it the Christmas season because we are, in fact, still over a month away from the Christmas season. This year, I can't say that we have come upon Advent because it is not yet Advent (in many years, the first Sunday of Advent often does fall the Sunday after Thanksgiving). What our so-called "holiday season" has become is just an excuse to engage in gross excess and-as my good friend from St. Albert the Great in Knoxville Stephanie Richer points out-a kind of crude Ba'al worship.


Nicole said I was being a bit of a Scrooge the other day because I launched what I believe is a perfectly valid complaint. Several of our area radio stations launch into constant Christmas music (some of them go even more secular and call it "holiday music." What holiday is this, Labor Day?) from Thanksgiving until Christmas, or even until the New Year. I found one the other day that had started playing this music even before Thanksgiving. I remarked that it didn't seem quite right to me to be singing of Christmas and chestnuts and sleigh rides or even the babe in the manger and the little drummer boy when we have not even really entered the season for that. It isn't that I have any trouble with Christmas music (I love Christmas and Christmas songs and carols have always been and remain some of my favorites-even the secular ones), but the rush to turn the remainder of the year into a holiday we haven't even reached and a feast we still have to prepare for in order that some people's profit margins might increase and we might gain some additional pleasure without preparing personally or spiritually for it. Yes, I expect that from our increasingly secularized culture, but when we see the people in our parishes falling into that trap it makes it all the more difficult to mark the passage of sacred time and to teach them what this time of year really means in its totality-the retelling again in sacred time of the Lord's coming-in memory of the First and anticipation of the Second Advent of the Lord.

As we mark the passage of one Year of Grace and the beginning of another, slow down. If you do, your Advent will likely be more Spirit-filled and your Christmas far more joyful and celebrated in a true spirit of charity and love.