Advent gratitude

This season, let us reach out to those in the darkness to offer them the ultimate source of light, the new born King.

Father Thomas Morrette

We do not know exactly when and where the season of Advent was established in the Church. The earliest feasts of the Church were Easter, Christmas and Epiphany. We believe that a preparation season was attached to Christmas early on, and it appears to have been observed in Rome from the beginning of the Church. Remember the words taught by John the Baptist, “Prepare ye the way of the Lord: make straight his paths.” Advent was established to prepare the world to celebrate Christmas — to look to His past coming 2,000 years ago, to His wondrous “comings” in the world now in His Church, and to His final coming at the end of our lives and end of time. Every year, the Church also stimulates the memory of the long waiting of the world for the first coming of the Savior by both God’s chosen people, Israel, and those who sought salvation in varied ways.

The time before Christ was an era when humanity evolved along with its knowledge of God. Feeble but sincere attempts to understand God, his creativity and his love, were made, but fell short of the entire and amazing story. A real moral and spiritual darkness covered the minds of humanity and it was a time far from hope and the living out of the commands of God. The false gods of the Assyrians were worshipped on the banks of the Euphrates. The temples of Babylon shown with great riches. The grandeurs of ancient Egypt reared its tombs and temples on the Nile. The mythologies of Athens and Rome obscured real knowledge of the one, true God. And the religion of Buddha which rose on the banks of the Ganges, along with paganism of the Druids, neglected the much-needed teachings of the Savior. How much the world needed Christ back then and the light of Truth that was made explicit in his coming as Savior.

We should keep all this in mind during Advent so that we are always truly grateful for our faith and all that was achieved in that little cave in Bethlehem, on the Cross, and from the tomb of the Resurrection. We ought to remember that the minds of men and women once stumbled about in the dark for centuries, with little or obscured knowledge of God. We should always remember that something radically changed when Christ came to earth: the revelation of the love of God, incarnate, enlightening, saving and personal.

Today, like life in pre-Christian days, we’re in a period of a new kind of paganism — “neo-paganism” — when it is sophisticated to reject Christ and the Church, to be neutral about religion, to treat it as a quaint and old-fashioned memory for the oddball few. We see members of the Church having grown cold, their children growing up without religious instruction and families falling away, their children seduced by worldly goals and values. Worshipped today are not the false gods of old but the god we have made of our secular culture. It’s the lure of this-worldly satisfaction, progress and success. It’s a world where God is uninteresting and, once again, becoming unknown.

For those of us with faith, let us thank God for the gift of Christ and our faith in Him and his Church. Let’s be grateful this Advent for all that it brings to us. Let us also resist the lure of diluting or abandoning such a gift and for regression. And for those who remain in the darkness, let us reach out, as we always do and will, again, and continually — to offer them the ultimate source of light and truth, the newborn King.

Father Morrette is pastor at The Catholic Community of Our Lady of Victory in Troy, Our Lady of the Snow Mission in Grafton and Christ Sun of Justice Parish in Troy.