By Michael Sean Winters
Advent began yesterday. “O house of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the Lord!” the prophet Isaiah told us at Mass yesterday. Jesus urged us to be wakeful in Matthew’s Gospel: “So too, you also must be prepared, for at an hour you do not expect, the Son of Man will come.” Advent is a forward looking season and what is it to which we look forward? Grace.
In a sense, Advent began back in March, on the Feast of the Annunciation. Luke’s Gospel tells us that the angel Gabriel appeared to the Blessed Virgin, greeting her with the words: “Hail, full of grace! The Lord is with you.” Advent is Marian at its core, for it is she who is pregnant with the Word of God. The Incarnation happens in her womb. There, the second person of the Trinity becomes the Word made flesh. How proper it is that we also call the mother of God the mother of the church. The body of Christ, which is the church, still becomes incarnate in her womb.
Advent is also a time of penance. How else are we to prepare ourselves to receive grace than by confessing our sins? The Hebrew and Christian Scriptures are filled with instructions on how we are to live, but the word of God comes alive and pierces our minds and hearts when we recognize our unworthiness. It is then, and only then, when we recognize how great a gift we receive in the Lord who washes away our sins. He is “death of death, and hell’s destruction” as we sing in the great hymn “Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah.”
This year, we have a son of Augustine in the chair of St Peter. The bishop of Hippo did not shy away from confronting the sinfulness of the human heart. He saw the way it lurks in even our good deeds. What would he make of our contemporary insistence of self-promotion and relentless affirmation? He would have none of it. Augustine understood that acknowledgement of our sinfulness was one of the necessary predicates for true conversion and self-surrender to which any follower of Christ must see him or herself called. No matter what the pop psychologists think, shame is a necessary part of the Christian vocation.
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