It's Advent and ... Weeeeee're Baaaaack

At least for a while. Rick and I talked it over and we've decided we're not quite done with this.
To get us started -- and Advent post with some comments from Rick that I wrote for my personal blog the Sunday before last:

Advent begins today – and this weekend signaled the end of Ordinary Time in the liturgical seasons. At Mass this morning, the vestments had changed, the first candle of the Advent wreath was lighted, and at home the decorations are being set up. Today I crank up the Christmas music – with some of the same intent as someone might crank up a hard rock soundtrack before entering the boxing ring. Seasons in the church –metaphysical seasons as regular and full of impact in our lives as the physical seasons. Just as autumn prompts a series of necessary changes and duties – from unpacking winter clothes to hauling in wood to putting up the storm windows – so a changing liturgical season prompts changes, visible and invisible. For me all of these changes serve one overriding function – they are a prompt, a reminder, an admonishment to realign priorities, to get focused. To reengage in the struggle on the highest level possible. The notion of getting focused feels particularly apt – it means seeing clearly. Taking off your glasses and giving them a good polishing. Jesus said in the Beatitudes, blessed are the clean of heart, for they shall see God. So that polishing that allows one to see clearly is a lava-rock-scrubbing-up of the soul; it stings some. All these wonderful Advent trappings ease the struggle that accompanies the end of Ordinary Time – the struggle that accompanies the effort to prioritize, to see clearly, to rise from a languorous stretch of sleepwalking and face the terrifying and wonderful notion that God is real, and because He is, that the world is real and that everything matters, and action, both internal and external, physical and metaphysical is required of us. Wish me luck. I’ll do the same for you, and wish you also a merry, merry Advent and Christmas season.

Comments

Good thoughts for the season. I haven't even begun to think about decorating for the holidays and, being steeped in the evangelical, born again, Jesus freak traditions of the Protestant fringe, my Christmas experience is far less disciplined. Each season is sort of like a mystery play in which my salvation experience is reenacted. I wander about, dead or else slightly antagonistic to the sentiments of the holiday, then, suddenly redemption falls upon me. I may just be driving to Shaws for a bag of stuffing, but like Paul on the road to Damascus, I hear a voice and see the light. I sometimes don't get the Christmas "spirit" until the night of the 24th, but it always comes. I don't participate in the lava soap soul scrubbing you describe. For me it's more like catharsis than cleansing, but I thank God for it. Also, one point of order: Maybe you took your verse from a different translation, but is it the "clean" of heart who will see God or the "pure" of heart? These seem like fundamentally different states to me. Clean regards externals, purity regards essence.

Posted by Rick Broussard 02 Dec 2007, 22:57

Interesting -- sounds to me like underneath the differences in experience lie similar results: a lot of "something" and then finally the redemptive payoff of the season. And worthwhile point for discussion on the translation -- I was going from memory (I just checked and it was correct) -- the last version I was reading was the "New American" translation, which isn't necessarily my favorite translation, but is a commonly accepted one. I'm not enough of an expert to argue for or against its validity based on earlier Latin, Greek or Aramaic words ... but (or maybe because of this) I'll take it either way. "Clean" has a variety of meanings internal and external. "Clean" or "pure", taken in the context of the passage they can be read equally validly. I'd say either is "sufficient."

Posted by Ernesto 03 Dec 2007, 08:00