The Story of Advent

THE STORY OF ADVENT

Advent is known, and yet not known. To some it is merely a name; to others, a beautiful custom, a lovely practice. Most of us have taken little, if indeed any, time to learn the history of the season or ponder its significance.

Advent does have a. history, however, an interesting one. To begin with, the Advent season as we now know it does not go back to the beginning of the Christmas era. It may come as a surprise, or even a shock, to learn that the date for the celebration of Christmas has not always been December twenty-fifth. There was a time, for instance, when Christmas was celebrated on the sixth of January. The church year took form gradually, and even today is not uniform everywhere.

Advent as we think of it today, is a season of preparation for Christmas. It includes four Sundays and a variable number of additional days, depending on the day of the week on which December twenty-fifth falls. There is no evidence of an established celebration of Christmas on December twenty fifth until the fourth century, and the season of preparation for that celebration is even more recent.

The season of Advent as such as is not mentioned until the seventh century. Its observance is said to have originated in Gaul. However, a synod at Saragossa, Spain in 380 prescribed a penitential preparation for Christmas. Canon IV (a church rule), states that from the seventeenth of December to Feast of Epiphany (January 6), everyone must attend church daily and that worshippers may not go to church with bare feet. This canon is thought to be the first rule ever passed regarding the observance of the season before Christmas.

There is some vague evidence that a small church council held at Tours about A. D. 567 prescribed a fast to be kept by monks every day in December. This is regarded by some as the first unquestionable reference to an Advent season. A few years later, in the south of Gaul, there is found what seems to be a less exacting rule that applied to everyone regarding the number of days on which the fast was to be observed. It appears evident that it involved a period of tasing, broken only on the third Sunday, which bore the designation, Gaudete, “Rejoice ye.”

The Council of Macon, A.D. 581, also had something to say about the season we know as Advent. Beginning with the Festival of St. Martin (November 11), the second, fourth and sixth days of the week were to be observed as days of fasting. The length of the season, however, seems to have varied a great deal, ranging from six weeks to three, and even two. At the close of the sixth century, Rome established the four Sundays before Christmas as Advent Sundays; in the next century this practice became prevalent, though not universal to the West.

In Roman Catholic churches today, practices vary greatly as to fasting. In Great Britain and Ireland, Wednesdays and Fridays are observed as fast days; but in many part of Europe the weeks in Advent are not set apart in any special way.

In England forty days of fasting before the celebration of the birth of the Lord were observed in the seventh and eighth centuries, as ordered for the Western church by Charlemagne’s “Homilarium.” In 1662 the English Book of Common Prayer stated that “Advent Sunday is always the Sunday nearest the feast of St. Andrew (November 30), whether before or after.”

In the Greek church the general observance of forty days of penitential preparation for Christmas does not appear to have been established before the thirteenth century. The Greek church of today begins the forty days of preparation on November eleventh. The fast is somewhat rigorous on Wednesdays and Fridays and somewhat relaxed on other days.

Different customs have obtained and still obtain during Advent. The Armenians, for instance, observe a fast during the week preceding the Nativity, and during one week beginning fifty days before the Nativity. For this reason it has been thought that these two weeks are of a survival of a fast that had originally lasted fifty days. In Normandy farmers still employ children to run with lighted torches through the fields and orchards setting fire to bundles of straw in order to drive out vermin so that the Christ child might have a clean bed. In Italy the last days of Advent are marked by the entry into Rome of the Calabrian pifferari (itinerant musicians from Calabia) who play bagpipes before the shrines of the Holy Mother, as the shepherds are believed to have done before the infant Savior.

It was natural, perhaps, inevitable, that in those branches of the early Protestant church which reacted violently against even the celebration of Christmas there should be no interest in the Advent season as such. In the liturgical branches of the Protestant church, of course, the season has always had considerable meaning. But it is to be noted that in nearly all church there is today a tendency to a growing observance of the special days and seasons of the Church year. The renewed emphasis presently being given to Advent is in part a reaction against the growing secularization of Christmas. Advent is seen to afford the Christian an opportunity to think clearly and soberly about the mystery of the Incarnation.

- Paul M. Lindberg
Advent: The Days Before Christmas (1966)

Looking Ahead to Advent, The Beginning Of A New Liturgical Year

Beginning today I want to shift my focus to the upcoming season of Advent, which begins on Sunday, November 30. Following is a post I have shared several times before, but for those who are not familiar with Advent which is the first day of the Liturgical Year, or as I refer to it, the Year of the Lord, I find it helpful as a baseline for understanding the meaning and significance of this lovely season. 

Over the next few days and weeks I will be sharing our traditions, ideas, resources and recipes for celebrating Advent, including ideas for observing St. Nicholas Day (December 6), St. Lucy's Day (December 13) and The O Antiphons, the eight golden days of Advent which begins on December 17, as well as The Advent Ember Days which occur on December 17, 19 and 20.

But now. to begin, here is the post I have shared around this time for several years now. Perhaps in the midst of so much political unrest in our country, the observance of Advent and The Year of the Lord will be a calming balm for our souls.

Many years ago I stumbled upon a book in the public library, Holidays and Holy Nights by Christopher Hill, who first introduced me, a wholly Protestant girl, to The Liturgical Year, or as I prefer to call it, The Year of the Lord. Though I was not raised Catholic, in reading this book I found a beauty and rhythm in The Liturgical Year that was appealing, even comforting to me. Recently, as I’ve begun working my way through the spiritual practices, I was reminded again of this lovely book and the in particular, the following passage. In my efforts to slow the pace of life, these words are a balm for my hurried soul, and what started me on my journey to a slower, sacred, and more meaningful way of living. 

"The whole point of the Year of the Lord is that there is more than one way to experience time. The understanding of time that most people live with is only one way to experience it. We could call it the worldly or profane understanding of time. It is an image of time as a straight horizontal line with a middle point, where we stand, called The Present. This line is always moving past us like a conveyor belt. On the left is the Past, where present moments constantly flow and immediately cease to exist. On the right is The Future, which is always moving toward the Present, but never actually arrives. 

This model is almost completely abstract. In other words, we never actually experience any of it. The present is gone before we are aware of it, and the past and future lie outside our grasp. Anxiety is built into it. Each human possesses only a limited quantity of this kind of time, and it is constantly passing us by, never to return. 

This view of time is not necessarily bad. It can be a useful tool. All human progress, in some sense, depends on it. But its not the whole or most important part of the picture. It is not the way we experience time in the deepest parts of ourselves, on the level of our hearts, and it is not the way God experiences time. Above and below this abstract, one-dimensional timeline, is well, reality. This is the world we actually experience, in which we “live and move and have our being”, as Paul said. The word “I Am” as God introduced himself to Moses. The present moment is eternity. 

For most of human history, people experienced time very different. The pattern was not a line, but a circle or cycle. The cycles of sun, moon and stars; of the seasons of the life, death and birth of plants, animals and human beings. Everything went away, but then in some way everything always came back. We can be sure that people living with this image of time still got anxious about things, but anxiety wasn’t built into the system itself. 

The image of the cycle contains a lot of truth. It expands the one-dimensional timeline into a two-dimensional circle and so takes in a lot more of reality. it is less abstract than the line, truer to experience and incorporates the fundamental patterns of creation. Years, seasons, months, weeks, days and hours all come from this model of time. Birth, life, death and rebirth are all in it. What it doesn’t include is the possibility for growth. In this cycle, the more things change, the more they stay the same. 

The Year of the Lord, the Christian understanding of time, is a variation on the cycle. The timeline, as we’ve said, is a one-dimensional model. The circle is two dimensional. The Year of the Lord is three-dimensional. It is modeled on the spiral, a circle that grows outward and upward. It grows in a vertical direction as well as horizontally, combining the straight line of the past, present and future with the height and depth of eternity. Like a spiraling tornado, it sucks one-dimensional time up into three dimensional reality. It uses time to break us out of time. It hallows and sacralizes time and transforms it into eternity. Year, season month, week, day and hour all concentric circles that lead deeper and deeper into the center; the present moment, where we live in the presence of God. The present is the Presence. And the present time ripples outward again, connecting us with all time and all the cosmos."

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