Don’t look now, but Advent is already coming around again. And whatever scientists say, time is not linear, not a straight line from birth to death. It’s always looping back to decisive personal moments, the natural calendar, and liturgical seasons such as Advent. We may now feel closer to past Advents (or at least past Christmases) than we do to this past summer. And we get only so many of them.  

In his For the Life of the World, American Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann scolds both Protestants and Catholics for trivializing our duty to sanctify our time—“the only reality of life.” We’re supposed to live and relive our days, weeks, and years as a kind of liturgy, Schmemann says, marrying Heaven and Earth. Instead, we may sometimes think about the Kingdom to Come, at some distant future, but that makes our real time, here and now, “meaningless, though full of Christian symbols,” he says, “and we don’t really know what to do with the symbols.” 

Ouch. Maybe we have turned seasons such as Advent into quarterly clearance sales (with bashes at Christmas, Easter, and Halloween). If we lived Advent, instead of remembering it, we might hang an Advent wreath over the dinner table, with three purple and one pink (gaudete!) candle, and light a new one each Sunday. We might invite some lonely elders to dinner. We would not put up our trees or lights until Christmas Eve. 

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That would all be very nice, especially for ritual-loving kids, “doing something with the symbols.” But what could it mean to live our seasons and feasts, instead of just observing them?

These days, we treat time like a tool or resource, like the gas in our cars, spouting idiocies like “time is money.” Time is all we have, all we can spend. If our time is our life, and life is a gift, then the interlocking rhythms of the Father’s Revelation in Nature (days, months, and years), and the Son’s Revelation in the Gospel, (Sabbaths, fasts, and feasts) are not accidents. Our Lord created them to nurture contemplation and gratitude. And gratitude, like contemplating a sunset or newborn, is our happiness. So “feast means joy,” says Schmemann. 

Gratitude means worship, and worship means sacrifice. As Bob Dylan sang, we’ll serve somebody, so inevitably, we serve a calendar. The foundation of every culture is its calendar. We submit to the business calendar, sacrificing our time to Moloch, or we give ourselves to the liturgical calendar, serving the Lord. So our feasts used to be called Holy Days of Obligation, obliging us to attend Mass on pain of mortal sin—even on workdays. We once had ten of them (1917): a little sacrificial, maybe, but contemplative and grateful. 

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Fortunately, Canada’s once-Protestant elite cemented Sundays, Christmas, New Year’s Day (our Mother of God), and Easter as civic holidays. But otherwise, we’ve indentured our Catholic year to work. Since the Easter Resurrection falls on Sunday, the Pentecost, fifty days later, also falls on Sunday. But that makes Ascension Thursday, historically forty days after Jesus’ Resurrection a little inconvenient. So the Canadian bishops moved it to the next Sunday, to avoid burdening our work week. Jesus could have made it forty-three days? 

The most important feast, though, is the Annunciation, 25 March, nine months before Christmas, and rarely a Sunday. The Church Fathers knew the Blessed Virgin embraced being sown with the Son of God, nine months before His birth, but back then, they assumed the Divine seed, like vegetable seeds, lay dormant for some unknown time. Today, we know human babies spring to life at the moment of conception. We know the Son of God became human with her fiat, taking half His genes and all His flesh from his Mom. So the Annunciation is as important as Christmas. If Catholics want to be “pro-life,” we should act like it, putting our feast where our faith is.   

What’s humiliating: American Catholics sacrifice four work-day Holy Days: Ascension Thursday, Assumption, All Saints, and Immaculate Conception. But they haven’t caught up with scientific embryology, either, and don’t sacrifice a work-day Annunciation.   

Circling back to Advent: we must baptize our calendar. Living the business calendar, we become blockheaded materialists, and we ignore the real reality around us: our “so great a cloud of witnesses.” Desperate for a parking spot, we may say a quick prayer to St. Anthony, but otherwise, we’re oblivious to the saints, not up in the sky, but right at our elbows, cheering us on. If ever “the veil dropped away” for us, we’d be awe-struck at the real crowd. 

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We could “sanctify our time” by greeting the saints of the Advent season: St. Nicholas (of course), St. Ambrose, the Immaculate Conception, Our Lady of Guadalupe—patroness of the Americas, eye-ful St. Lucy. There’s a saint for every day of Advent, and all it would take is reading their stories at the dinner table. If we no longer “do dinner,” we might commit to a family dinner, every evening of the season—when we light our Advent wreath. 

Joseph Woodard is a research fellow with the Gregory the Great Institute in Alberta.