Advent: Time to Wake Up!

Don’t be afraid, the Lord is faithful. Therefore, you can be faithful and surrender to Him. He will come on time – His time, not your time, since all time belongs to Him.

Written by Fr Sean Sheehy for Catholic Unscripted

The Catholic Church begins a new liturgical year with the holy season of Advent. The Church refers to the year as liturgical because she devotes the time to publicly worshiping God and thanking Him for the blessings He has bestowed on the worshippers. Liturgy is all about the solemn worship of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Advent is the first season of the liturgical year during which the Church prepares her members and the world to celebrate Jesus’ birth and reminds them to be prepared for when they meet Him face-to-face by uniting themselves now with His Sacramental presence in His Church. The other holy seasons are: Christmas, Lent, Easter, and Pentecost. Throughout this New Year, God will bestow graces through His Church on His children and through them on the world calling it to repentance and conversion.

The impact of the blessings from those graces will depend on the degree of receptivity of those upon whom they’re bestowed. As the Holy Spirit reminds us through St. Paul:

Now all glory to God, who is able, through His mighty power at work within us, to accomplish infinitely more than we might ask or think” (Eph 3:20).

As we begin this new year of grace, the Holy Spirit expresses urgency regarding the correction of our sinful behaviour: “You must wake up now: your salvation is nearer than it was when you first converted ... Let us live decently ... no drunken orgies, not promiscuity or licentiousness (sexual behaviour characterized by lewdness and lack of chastity), no wrangling or jealousy. Let your armour be the Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom 13:11-14). He reminds us that we are subject to the Lord. “While we live we are responsible to the Lord, and when we die we die as His servants. Both in life and in death we are the Lord’s…Every one of us will have to give an account of himself before God …” (Rom 14:8-12).

Preparing us to begin this new year of grace, the Holy Spirit, guiding Jesus’ Church, rouses us up from our spiritual torpor and calls us to make Jesus the centre of our life empowering us to counter the wiles and ways of Satan and our own proneness to sin. He urges us in the words of St. Peter:

“Be of sober spirit, be alert. Your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour” (1 Pt 5:8).

Satan is cunning. He hates us and will do anything to destroy us by promoting lies as truth and making false gods attractive. He uses false teachers, even within the Church, who try to promote his lies about creating a “new way to be Church” instead of Jesus’ way, which is the Way of the Cross. Therefore, Jesus warns us to, “Be on your guard against false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but underneath are wolves on the prowl” (Mt 7:15). False prophets come both from without and from within Jesus’ Church aiming to make her more amenable to worldly thinking. It’s so easy to be lulled to sleep by the humanistic/atheistic/nihilistic culture that focuses only on gratifying the body while totally ignoring the soul. This culture of death offers impotent remedies and poisoned food when the starved soul makes itself manifest in feelings of emptiness, loneliness, self-rejection, depression, inner turmoil, joylessness, listlessness, wrath, addiction, abuse, violence, etc. Only the “armour of the Lord” (Eph 6:11) will guard us from these spiritual maladies spawned by the malignant enemy that underlie much of our loneliness and our vain search for love in all the wrong places. Satan uses our loneliness to tempt us to try and fulfil ourselves with what fails to satisfy us or to get us to doubt that God cares for us and wants to make us whole through calling us into an intimate relationship with Him as His children.