Advent has come quickly this year, riding the tails of Thanksgiving. After a busy week with the kids home from school, deer rifle season and resting up, it wasn’t until late in the evening that we talked with the kids about it being Advent and what that means.
Most of the world around us is already in full-blown Christmas mode. My daughters knew exactly when Life 97.3’s radio station would start playing Christmas music 24-7. I have tried to look past Christmas store displays that have been up since before Halloween. Black Friday has effectively kept gift-giving front and center through endless ads and promo events that more often seem to taunt us with buying things we never knew we needed.
While I, like I imagine most of you, am struggling to define what Advent will look like this year for my family and me, the young men in our home have been beacons of intentionality. My 12-year-old has mentioned that we really shouldn’t be listening to Christmas music until Christmas, focusing on the Advent songs of waiting and longing he’s hearing at Mass. In recent years, I have tried to find Advent playlists or even sticking to only instrumental Christmas music. I usually give in during that final novena of preparation starting Dec. 16, but it has been a helpful way to focus on Advent as a period of anticipatory preparation.
Our 16-year-old Spanish exchange student has shared how, like in many culturally Catholic countries, Christmas Day is focused more on the birth of the Savior and gifts are given on the Feast of the Epiphany to coincide with the gifts of the Magi. I don’t think we’re going to get away with upstaging Santa Claus, but these are all wonderful discussion points at home, and moments of renewed intentionality for my husband and me.
Whatever our stage in life and family circumstances, we each will have opportunities to “Keep Christ in Christmas” and living Advent with this mindfulness is the right foundation.
Reflecting on the Catholic Imagination Conference I attended at Notre Dame Oct. 31 through Nov. 2, I am affirmed in the conviction of the primary role our imagination plays in the living of our faith and the pursuit of an intimate relationship with God.
Surrounded by Catholic intellectuals and writers, I was excited to see the energetic movement behind a real renewal in Catholic arts and letters. The conference, put on by Notre Dame’s deNicola Center for Ethics and Culture jointly with the biennial Catholic Imagination Conference, started in 2015 by renowned Catholic poet Dana Gioia, was attended by 1,200 people. Priests, religious, college students, scholars and professionals chose from 175 presentations in a colloquia format over the two-and-a-half-day conference.
Coming from a more evangelistic and parish-pew-Catholic background, I felt like a bit of an outsider but stepping into my journalist persona, one of the highlights of the conference was simply meeting and networking with people. As I would share the motivations behind the Master’s in Fine Arts – Poetry that I am pursuing at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, the heart of a Catholic Literary Arts revival under the leadership of James Matthew Wilson and Joshua Hren, I was resoundingly encouraged in my own desires to build bridges between this world of beauty-crafters and those of us spiritually starving for an encounter with beauty itself.
Bishop Robert Barron, in addition to an increasing number of priests, religious and lay speakers and writers, speaks often about the three transcendentals of truth, goodness and beauty. Each is a unique trailhead on a journey toward God and living of faith but there’s no question that truth has been largely the focus of the last two decades of explosion of catechetical and evangelization tools. Goodness is at the heart of the church’s social justice mission and the perennial call to serve those in need.
Yet, an encounter with beauty – especially when it intentionally guides us beyond itself to the Creator – does more than form our intellects and motivate us to undertake good works. Beauty unlocks the door to a transformative ordering of our desires, it integrates truth and goodness and fans the flame of divine love that popes have called us to for generations.
If truth forms our mind and goodness motivates the will, it is beauty that primarily inflames our hearts which is our truest center and self. How many of us know the faith and serve others but have never really fallen in love with Christ? Religiously-themed poetry and even the poetic images of metaphors from nature have truly reshaped my entire relationship with God from one of knowing and doing to a sense of active receptivity to God’s love and providential action in my daily life. We are often told we can’t give what we don’t have and many Catholics feel like missionary spirit is meant to be a channel more than a reservoir from which our own encounter with God spills over to everyone we encounter.
Part of what this “Catholic poetry” can do starts with the invitation to encounter something that intimidates us, that takes us out of our comfort zone and challenges us to go beyond the here-and-now, to be open to touching the reality that holds the entire universe together; and if that isn’t a metaphor itself for what Advent calls us to – wrapping our minds around an omnipotent God wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a food trough – I don’t know where else we find a better starting point. To cultivate our own “Catholic imaginations” can bring us into a more personal and intimate encounter with the God who continually reminds us that we, each of us, are the sole and entire object of his love and goodness. Once we have truly experienced that, have been deeply changed by God’s personal love, we will become the disciples and apostles he calls us to be.
If you haven’t found an Advent practice yet this year, or if you want to give Beauty a chance to work its wonders this Christmas, I invite you take on Advent or Christmas hymn a day and quietly read through it. Reflect on the words at least twice and notice at what phrase or image your heart skips a beat, where you feel your breath gently release as a sigh. Those are the unlocking doors our Lord is inviting you to enter in through to discover him in deeper ways this Christmas.
Pope Francis, in his recently released Dilexit Nos shares, in paragraph 11, “if we fail to appreciate the specificity of the heart, we miss the message that the mind alone cannot communicate; we miss out on the richness of our encounters with others; we miss out on poetry. We also lose track of history and our own past, since our real personal history is built within the heart. At the end of our lives, that alone will matter.”
Jenny Snarski
