Also... I've said most of this before, but the new-ish appropriation by conservative non-liturgical Christians (including "progressive" conservative non-liturgical Christians) of the word "Advent" to mean "Christmas," or more specifically, "Christmas, but kind of edgy, spiritual and socially conscious, while still observed according to the secular American calendar" is getting so bad that already today on Advent 1 I almost want to shut down Twitter, Facebook, and my RSS reader until Dec 24th. Half the posts with some Advent-related tag on Twitter are actually about Christmas.

I have a Bible app on my phone, and this afternoon it tweeted me Advent begins today, so it's a great time to start a Christmas Reading Plan!  Guys, there could hardly be a WORSE time to start a Christmas reading plan. JUNE would be a better time to undertake an off-season Christmas reading plan then the first three weeks of December. Doing a Christmas reading plan in Advent is a 100% guaranteed way to wreck your Advent.

Please please please, stop stealing our word. We need this word. It means something. And we urgently need that something, a reality which is very, very far from being even the least bit Christmas-y.


This also reminds me that I was looking earlier today at materials from the working group in the North American Academy of Liturgy (that's the Ph.D. liturgy geeks) who are doing trial runs in parishes of restoring a 7-week Advent, which has not been used since the 11th century in the West.  (You don't have to change the readings, because they already move into an eschatological focus after All Saints anyway.) One of the essays made a very persuasive point to me, which is that the beginning of the liturgical year should have a function of "setting the tone" for the whole liturgical cycle that follows.

[T]he primary focus of Advent is the full manifestation of the Reign of God. This is the exclusive focus of the lectionary (Scripture readings) from the Sunday after All Saints’ Day (November 1) until the last week of Advent. Only in the last week do these readings which form the thematic emphasis of the Church’s weekly worship begin to shift from a focus on eschatology to that of incarnation.The intent of the season is to look to the end, to the fulfillment of the implications of the Paschal Mystery set forth “for us and for our salvation” [Nicene Creed] in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. In other words, the focus is on the Christian hope represented by the full manifestation of the Reign of God established in Christ. In this respect, then, Advent is about eschatology. It is a looking to the end, to the goal, to the eternal moment that makes sense of all our moments. One of the implications of this is the need to recover the understanding that this is the primary focus of Advent. It is a season not so much a preparation for the incarnation, the celebration of Christmas, but a season that sets the context for the entire liturgical year and keeps it, properly observed, from being merely a repetitive cycle. In other words, by this emphasis, Advent calls us to enter the cycle each year with deeper understandings, wider horizons, and higher expectations.

We look up, in essence, and reorient ourselves, and then live the remainder of the cycle in light of that renewed understanding of our final goal. The paper pointed out that because of intense cultural pressure either to either bring Christmas itself forward into November/December, or even in liturgical churches to reduce the "anticipation" of Advent crudely into no more than a literalistic anticipation of this-year's-Christmas festivities, most people have very little chance to benefit from this kind of eschatological reorienting shock to start the new year. If those 3 weeks of eschatological themes after All Saints were being treated as part of Advent, the "begin the year" piece and the "eschatological" piece would have a stronger chance of working, or so the NAAL working group thinks.

I don't know how I'd feel with a 7-week Advent, but what's interesting to me is that this just illustrates how 30+ years of liturgy done well teaches you without your realizing it, because I have long felt that there was some deep resonance to the "new year" aspect of Advent -- certainly more than is captured in just having a new Gospel and the other normal changes -- but could never have articulated the function that the quotation above describes. But once I read it I'm like "Well... YEAH!"