So, we’ve returned to the season of Advent, and once again I find myself puzzling over the same old questions. Advent is surely the most problematic season of the liturgical year. Good Catholics know, of course, that it is a penitential season. It is a time for discipline, for special penances, and for reflection on one’s own emptiness and on how desperately we are in need of the coming Lord. “O come, o come, Emmanuel!” should be the cry of the Advent season, and cultivating this feeling requires the kind of asceticism and penitential spirit that more famously characterizes Lent. True, it is appropriate that Advent should be milder. In Lent we trace Our Lord’s footsteps to the cross and humanity’s darkest hour, but in Advent we anticipate no such horror. Nevertheless, the Church in her wisdom knows that we humans, frail creatures that we are, will not properly appreciate the beauty of the dawn unless we have also sat through the darkest, coldest hour that comes right before. This must be the time when we, like the maidens of the Gospel story, sit in waiting for the Bridegroom.

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If there is such a thing as preparation for preparation, in a recent edition of the Angelus, Fr. Gerard Beck has given us an excellent means by which to fit ourselves for Advent, the great preparation for Christ’s coming. In order to be ready for Christ’s advent in our hearts, at Christmas, and at the end of the time, we must walk the way of penance, Fr. Beck tells us. Through penance, we erase the stains of actual sins while also combating congenital weaknesses due to original sin.

I remember Fr. Carl Gismondi in Scranton, PA drawing a distinction between the types of penance which we do during Advent and Lent. While the penance of Lent is directed more towards sackcloth, ashes, and fasting, the penance of Advent tends to be more hidden and interior. Yet whether during Advent or Lent, Fr. Beck reminds us, every penance is a means to the end of sanctification; the penance is not the end itself. If a penance encourages more generous, sincere sentiments of heart towards God and our neighbor, we have found the right penance for us. The mortification of our bad habits, vices, and dispositions, i.e. death to self, is our goal, irrespective of the means.
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