Archives for December 2015

Advent Novena Meditation: Day 2

Bernardo Aparicio García

The following is the meditation for Day 2 (December 17) of the Advent Novena. For the full text of the novena, click here.

The Annunciation by Matthew Alderman

Day 2:

At the holy house of Nazareth, where Mary and Joseph lived, the Eternal Word was about to take on a created nature. As the Holy Spirit approached to overshadow her with the divine decree, Mary was alone, engulfed in prayer. She spent the quite hours of the night in a most intimate union with God, and as she prayed, the Word took possession of His created abode. However, He did not arrive uninvited. Before coming to her He sent a messenger, the Archangel Gabriel, to request on God’s behalf Mary’s consent to the miracle of the Incarnation. The Creator did not wish to consummate this great mystery without the assent of His creature.

It was a solemn moment, for it remained within Mary’s power to refuse. With what sublime delights, with what ineffable rejoicing the Holy Trinity must have awaited the moment in which Mary was to open her lips to pronounce that “fiat,” a word must have been as a tender melody before God! Through it, Mary conformed her being, in an act of free and profound humility, to the omnipotent divine will.

The Immaculate Virgin has given her assent. The archangel has vanished. God has clothed Himself in a created nature. The eternal will has been accomplished, the whole of Creation consummated. From the angelic realms bursts forth a roar of jubilation, but the Virgin Mary does not hear it—nor would she have paid attention to it if she had. Rather, her head was bowed and her soul immersed in a godly silence. The Word had become flesh, and though He remained still invisible to the world, He now dwelled among those whom his limitless love had come to rescue. He was no longer simply the Eternal Word; he was the Child Jesus, clothed in human form, already worthy of being called by all generations the most beautiful among the sons of men.

Krampus Resurgent

Jonathan McDonald

The last decade has seen an unexpected resurgence of the Germanic folklore figure Krampus in American popular culture. We’ve had Hollywood-produced Santa movies since there’s been a Hollywood, and the Santa Claus myth has been deconstructed and reconstructed therein so many times that now he’s little more than a duct-taped body cobbled together from many disparate parts.

Santa is used sometimes to promulgate the humanist meaning of Christmas (Miracle on 34th Street), sometimes as a pop-mythologized hero figure (Santa Claus: The Movie), and occasionally as a bit of background dressing (The Nightmare Before Christmas). One cannot really expect any more religious meaning than this from a country founded on deistic-humanist principles, but too frequently it makes for thin fare.

None of which has anything to do with the real St. Nicholas, of course. He’s been off doing his own thing for centuries while his doppelgängers run wild…

But Krampus? Krampus was the Devil of Christmas, albeit a chained devil. He was a companion of Sinterklaas who whipped evil children with birch branches and carted them off to Hell in his bag. The chains represent the Devil’s subjugation to God, and show that he operates at Heaven’s sufferance. That, more or less, is the traditional version of Krampus.

The newer pop-Krampus is the sworn enemy of Santa Claus and his equal. He’s the yin to Santa’s yang; Santa’s opposite, rather than his slave. All of which came into focus recently when I watched the new Michael Dougherty film Krampus. Everything this film demon does is a twisted inversion of American Santa tropes. This new Krampus is Santa’s “shadow,” imitating and subverting the jolly old elf at every turn. If anything, the new Krampus might be more powerful than Santa, even being described as a more ancient evil.

(None of which is to say that I didn’t enjoy the film. I actually thought it was a rather good example of that dying genre, the morality tale. The production values were excellent, and the dark humor frequently reminded me of Gremlins. It might have too much horror for a broad audience to enjoy, though.)

Carl Jung would doubtless have written a two-volume set about what Krampus Resurgent means about our collective unconscious. Maybe our country is using this to work through its growing hatred of Christian holy days. Maybe we’re tired of paper-thin happiness and manufactured joy. Maybe it’s an indicator of our increased cynicism about the commercialization of Christmas. Maybe subconsciously we all know that our anti-religious attitude is going to get us dragged down to Hell someday, and we’re manifesting that fear through pop culture. How long until we start seeing the Krampuslauf on our city streets?

What’s next? Will we be rewriting our classic Christmas stories to include this dark beast? The Christmas Carol, with Krampus.

“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

The Anarchy of Advent

Karen Ullo

Christmas is not an event within history but is rather the invasion of time by eternity. –Hans Urs von Balthasar

Despite the (often justified) grumbling of so many Advent Curmudgeons about celebrating our liturgical feasts in their proper sequence, the Season of Advent itself has little respect for chronology. Advent is temporal anarchy, a rebellion against a strictly linear experience of existence. We are waiting for the birth of a child that happened two thousand years ago. We try to mitigate this paradox by also anticipating His second coming at the end of all ages–but the readings for the Sundays of Advent focus on the Second Coming first. In this year’s Lectionary Cycle C, we hear Luke 21 (the apocalyptic end-times) on the first Sunday of Advent, Luke 3 (John the Baptist and “prepare the way”) on the second and third Sundays, and we end with Luke 1 (Mary and Elizabeth awaiting the birth of Jesus) on the fourth Sunday. Yes, we read the Gospel backwards.

The lectionary goes on to defy all logic by returning to Luke 3 on the last Sunday of the Christmas season, the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord. If Advent is a time of screaming, “Hey, Christmas, wait your turn,” one would think it might at least have the courtesy not to rain on Christmas’s duly-scheduled parade. But instead, on the final day of poinsettias around the altar, the last chance to squeeze “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,” into the repertoire, we go right on back to Isaiah and that classic Advent refrain, “A voice cries out: In the desert prepare the way of the Lord!” I hope the Advent Curmudgeons all smile smugly on that day, when Christmas receives its comeuppance. But I also suspect there is something more going on than a rivalry between two seasons.

If eternity is, as many saints have claimed, not endless time but all times at once, then Advent is a season that mimics eternity. Advent takes the many various layers of Christian longing and piles them on top of each other, so that we experience them simultaneously. Here in a beautiful, illogical, finite and well-defined stretch of time, we encounter a beginning that starts with an end, an Alpha that is an Omega, a Gospel that runs backward only to begin running forward again. We are waiting, we say, but then we celebrate the Eucharist, the Word Made Flesh coming among us in the here-and-now. We prove ourselves liars, but still we go on waiting. Celebrating Advent can make you dizzy.

But Advent is only a season of preparation. If it mimics eternity, it is to point us toward the fact that we await the coming of the Eternal One. Christmas celebrates the moment when God let Himself be bound by the constraints of flesh, but also the constraints of time. When the Word became Flesh, the temporal became bound to the eternal. Eternity became a slave to time so that we might experience eternity. We are waiting for a single moment of history that has already happened; but we are still waiting for it because it is the moment that unites all other moments. We are waiting for the moment of Jesus’ birth because we will experience it firsthand someday–though “someday” is hardly the right word to express that time will no longer hold us in its shackles.

If none of this makes sense to you, don’t worry. I don’t understand it, either. But I do understand that Advent plays fast and loose with time in order to teach us that God can do the same. He can fill us before we know we are empty. He can write the beginning long after the end. He can speak to us in mysteries so far beyond our understanding, they appear to us as nonsense. Advent is a time to revel in the mystery, to humble ourselves before our ignorance of ways that are beyond our ways and thoughts that are beyond our thoughts. It is a time to wait for what we already have. When we can do that well, we will be ready to receive the eternal gift of Christmas.

This Is the Advent Tradition You’ve Been Looking For

Bernardo Aparicio García

Slowly but surely, Advent is making a comeback. It may not seem so in the culture at large, where it would appear we’d be just as well moving Christmas to August. However, as the consumerism of the season turns into self-parody, many are longing for a more meaningful celebration. The result is that Advent has been getting more press time.

Unfortunately, once the family has put up an Advent wreath and sung a couple of rounds of “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,” a disturbing thought creeps in: now what? In other words, how should one live Advent other than by saying it’s not Christmas yet? Advent is indeed meant to be a season of penitence. Seeking silence, giving to charity, and going to confession are all practices I strongly endorse. But Advent is also supposed to be a season of longing, of looking forward to Our Lord’s return by getting excited about his liturgical coming at Christmas. For that, we need practices that fill us with expectation. We need traditions.

Unfortunately, given Advent’s long neglect, most families don’t have any, which is where this post comes in.

If you were reading our blog last year, you probably know where this is going (in fact, the rest of this post may seem really familiar). The great thing about being Catholic is that the Church is truly universal, and where traditions are lacking we can look to the broader Catholic world for guidance. I’d like to share with you what I consider perhaps the most meaningful of the Advent traditions I grew up with in Colombia, the Advent Novena, in the hopes that you may be able to incorporate it into your Advent celebrations as well.

Mmmmm… natilla.

What is the Advent Novena?

Not quite what you think. Like all other novenas, the Advent novena comprises a set of prayers to be said during nine days, but it is also much more. The novena is light, friendship, song. It is, in a sense, a perfect balance of everything truly human, the sacred and the secular brought together in effortless harmony. Starting on December 16th, families, friends, and neighbors begin gathering every night to count down the days until Christmas. There are carols, holiday dishes, prayers, meditations, and companionship.

The way it usually works is that people gather for the novena sometime around 7:00 or 8:00 p.m. After ever everyone is settled in, the host for the day begins prayers (if several families are participating, usually hosting duties are rotated day to day), and once these are done, people sing their favorite Advent or Christmas carols (bringing some instruments, even just very basic noisemakers, is definitely a plus!).

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Spread from last year’s novena. Hot chocolate in the foreground, empanadas, and cheesy breads in the back.

After getting in a good session of caroling, it is time to eat! Colombians like to break out the natilla (a custard dish) and buñuelos (fried cheesy breads). I’ll be providing recipes in case you’re feeling adventurous, but feel free to celebrate with your own favorites. After this point, people usually just sit and chat, sign more songs, eat (and on occasion even dance) until bedtime. And then the next day, you do it all over again!

Isn’t it a bit much to do this for nine days straight?

Yes, and no. As I said, ideally you’ll find at least a couple of more households who are willing to rotate hosting duties. And you don’t have to do the full thing every night–feel free to just do some nights quietly with your own family, or just by yourself if you live alone. But try to stick with it all nine days, and to make it as communal as possible. By the end of it, you will feel truly ready for Christmas, and the day will not seem like a blur that just comes and goes, but rather as the culmination of a process of preparation.

So where do I get the prayers?

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Last year’s novena at the Aparicios’.

During the past few years, a couple of translations into English have started popping up on the Internet. Unfortunately, they are not very good (sometimes I wonder if they’re not the product of Google Translate). One part that is almost entirely lost in these translations is a section made up of short rhyming verses inspired by the “O Antiphons” from the Liturgy of the Hours. It’s a truly delightful section, theologically rich and yet always a favorite with kids, but prose translations simply don’t do it justice. For these reasons, I’ve decided to come up with my own translation, the link to which you can find below.

If organizing a gathering of friends for the 16th is short notice, just start at home on your own, but I encourage you to pick at least one day or two this Advent to actually host a gathering. Several people tried it last year and wrote to say they had loved it. Do let us know in the comments section if you decide to take up this tradition.

Happy Advent!

Click here for the text of the novena.

Irish Wake

Dappled Things

Joseph O’Brien

for Patrick Slattery

And with the clashing of their sword-blades make A rapturous music, till the morning break...
--W.B. Yeats

We’re a nation of all talk, recording
The story of our blood, registering
Our complaints against Land, Lord and Love
According to the latest government,
Counting past grudges and future graces 
On our beads and in our pews as from the isles. [Read more...]

The Moral and Legal Obligations of Catholic Judges

Dappled Things

F.P. Sampino

On Thursday, August 26, 2004, U.S. District Court Judge Richard C. Casey issued a ruling striking down the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003. Legally speaking, it was an unremarkable and entirely expected result. Four years earlier, the Supreme Court had ruled in Stenberg v. Carhart that a similar Nebraska state ban was unconstitutional. But Judge Casey’s opinion attracted attention for different reasons – not least of which is that he is a devout Catholic. [Read more…]

The Advent Curmudgeon

Michael Rennier

Your social media pictures of Christmas trees already assembled and decorated in November make me shudder. I am a small-hearted, fussy man. I like my Christmas in December, please, and that not until the actual Feast of the Nativity (Not the Feast of the Incarnation. Rookie mistake) on the evening of the 24^th. The problem is me, not you. Well, the problem is a bit more widespread than that, but my attitude, I mean. My bad attitude is all me. The real problem is that as a culture we don’t really know how to celebrate Christmas anymore. Most of us dive right into the saccharine insanity of it even before Thanksgiving. This year, in fact, I saw Christmas wrapping paper displays at the grocery store in the month of October! Dear giant, impersonal corporations, please stop making us hate holidays.

Like Santa, I feel the real need to punch something.

It seems to me that we currently have two options. We can either learn to stop worrying, buy the wrapping paper in June, put up the tree when the school year starts, and sing our hearts out to Jingle Bell Rock during Lent, or we can become emotionally warped anti-Christmas crusaders and maintain a penitential Advent with nary a wisp of mistletoe in sight. The best of this breed leaves the Christmas tree up until February and haughtily explains to the rest of us that in the unreformed, medieval calendar, Christmas lasts until the feast of Purification. I am tempted to become the latter of these options. But really, neither one is any good at all.

Caravaggio’s nativity is powerful for its lack of sentimentality. Mary is isolated and exhausted, but she has her Son. He is all she needs.

The first seems more open-hearted but ends up destroying the holiday season. We are so tired of celebrating that by the time the Feast of the Nativity actually arrives, we are exhausted; the tree is taken down the next day and the next 11 days of Christmas go uncelebrated. What about the Epiphany and the wise men! These intrepid travelers shift heaven and earth to make their way across the desert only to find our doors locked and the manger scene boxed up in the basement. The Christmas festivities that predate the birth of Our Lord seem to have been unearned, a sentimental holiday that makes its departure from the Nativity but doesn’t actually understand the way in which the birth of Our Lord shakes the very foundations of the universe.

The other option, the Advent curmudgeon, is also an untenable position because it misses the whole point in a different way. At the heart of all the traditions and rules of the Church is the everlasting virtue of charity. At Christmas, this is impossible to miss, like not noticing a crying babe in a manger. The anti-Christmas crusader gets the rules right but doesn’t notice Christ. Nothing to see here. It’s still Advent. As I said, I’m sympathetic but what we really need is to find a way to maintain respect for both seasons and truly celebrate the Birth of Christ while rising to his challenge to, above all else, love.

So, how to celebrate in a way that embraces the love that everyone seems to have developed for the season? Sure, there are the usual complaints about over-commercialization and bad music and all that, but the point really is that in an increasingly post-Christian world, people are celebrating the birth of Christ! Even a tame, watered-down version of the feast is better than nothing at all. I’m not really interested in fighting it.

The secret is in the Catholic calendar.

Here are a few ways, based on the joyful preparation of the Church, to properly celebrate that both get us into the spirit of the season but also respect the unique celebrations that are Advent and Christmas. The best part of it is, when Christmas comes each year, our family is happy to celebrate the whole season.

Make an Advent wreath and actually light it each night at dinner. Ostentatiously explain to the kids that the 3^rd candle isn’t pink; it is rose.
Celebrate the Feast of St. Nicholas on Dec 6. Have the kids put out shoes to be filled with chocolate coins. Explain to them that St. Nick both loved children and punched heretics. And he actually existed.
Celebrate the Feast of St. Lucy on Dec 13. Nominate a “St. Lucy” and go all out with the wreath-candle hat. Have the boys make hats decorated with stars and moons. Form a procession to the neighbor’s house to deliver treats. Chant an old-school litany. Kids love it.
8 days before Christmas, begin singing one of the “O Antiphons” each night before dinner. Basically, the verses to O Come O Come Emmanuel. Monks have been chanting these for hundreds of year at Evening Prayer and they are really a lovely way to mark the time. Bonus points if you do it in Latin.
On Christmas Eve, decorate the tree, put on all the Christmas music, and go totally overboard. I think it was GK Chesterton who argued that the Feasts of the Church should arrive suddenly and joyously. At Christmas, this is particularly appropriate because it is exactly how a new child arrives into the world: suddenly and joyously.
Christmas Day. Go to Mass! This is a really great experience and we have found that it doesn’t take away from family time at all. After Mass we come home and feast on all manner of pancakes and breakfast treats. If Advent is penitential, Christmas has to be a true feast.
Keep the tree up for at least the 12 days after. While everyone else is sick of Christmas. We are just getting started. We don’t leave it up until Feb 2 because that tends to feel like a bit too much, but we compromise and leave it usually until the Baptism of Our Lord in mid-January.

Happy Holidays!

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