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I have to admit: Besides the whole chocolate calendar thing, I’m not really an Advent person.
Advent started this Sunday, Nov. 29, and I just gotta say, Advent and I don’t mesh well. I know it’s supposed to be this anticipatory, joyous time, but really it just feels like a whole lot of dates and weird rituals all thrown in my face, much like baseball season, when I’m the only person in Chicago who doesn’t have one of those “W” stickers on her window and I have no idea who Kosuke Fukudome is. And no, I don’t care who Kosuke Fukudome is, and yeah, I had to use Wikipedia to confirm that spelling, and by the way, for like five years I thought the “W” flags were pro-George W. Bush banners, don’t ask me why. (And I was all, are you kidding me, Chicago?)
Anyway. Advent.
The Advent wreaths, the holy days of obligation — it’s a lot to process. I converted to Catholicism a few years ago, so admittedly I’m still trying to catch up on all the church rituals I missed in my pseudo-Protestant upbringing. Needless to say, I’m still at the stage where I’m looking most of this stuff up on Wikipedia and screaming, “What’s with all these feast days? WHY IS EVERYTHING PURPLE?” So if you find yourself stumbling into Madonna Della Strada thinking something along those lines, just know that you’re not alone.
This year, however, I’m determined to internalize something about this holiday so I’m not completely inept. Ultimately I realized, wafting my way through Advent recipes and feast day decorations, that all these traditions are very nice and colorful, like frosting on a cake, but let’s be real here. I’m not Martha Stewart. And maybe the best way to have a spiritually fruitful Advent isn’t staying up until four a.m., exhausted, slumped over a textbook, my Saint Nicholas cookies burning in the oven, only to jump up and scream “WAS I SUPPOSED TO GO TO MASS TODAY?!” (I scream a lot during Advent.)
But God help me, I’m going to internalize something.
I got an e-mail the other day from a family friend with a quote from then-Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict) about the meaning of Lent (he must have sensed my frustration). It said: “The purpose of the Church’s year is continually to rehearse her great history of memories, to awaken the heart’s memory so that it can discern the star of hope … It is the beautiful task of Advent to awaken in all of us memories of goodness and thus to open doors of hope.”
Cookies I can do. This year, in preparation for Christmas, I want to internalize hope.
I hope.
I hope I’ll escape from finals unscathed.
I hope I get to graduate on time.
I hope the Crown Center gallery finds a suitable home.
I hope the Phoenix retains its remarkable journalistic integrity after our News Editor Nicole Charky graduates next month and breaks all of our hearts.
I hope the hordes of students with H1N1 recover fully and quickly.
I hope a grieving Loyola community can find peace.
I hope the wars on the streets of Chicago — like the murder of Derrion Albert — will end.
At times, these hopes feel more like wants. How appropriate, then, that we’ve entered into a season of waiting. I want all these things, badly. Sometimes I even think I need them, and I cling to memories of what life was once, and maybe what it will be again. But I have to wait. And, for my own sanity, I have to hope that it will come.
I wait. I hope. I wait some more. And suddenly Advent starts to take on a rhythm of its own. It starts to make sense. As a Church, as a community, we wait. We hope.
We wait for this construction to end. We wait for the end of finals, the end of school. We wait for peace. We wait for Christ.
Sarah Watts is the Discourse Editor.
swatts@luc.edu
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