The Season of Advent Invites Quiet Reflection

Tomorrow is the first Sunday of Advent, the holy season of spiritual introspection and preparation that marks the beginning of the new Christian church year.

At a time when businesses hang yuletide decorations on city lampposts and in suburban shopping malls even before Thanksgiving, many Christians feel frustrated by the pervasive commercialization that takes attention away from Advent and its symbolism.

“It’s a constant struggle to balance the expectation, while we are being bombarded all around us with Christmas carols and the biggest sale of the year,” said Linda Duffendack Mays, director of music at the Church of Our Saviour, an Episcopalian church in San Gabriel.

But there is a movement afoot to “recover” Advent, say pastors, theologians and Christian lay workers. Increasingly, Advent is taking center stage in the lives of many families in Southern California, they say.

“It’s trying to put Christ back into Christmas,” said theologian Edmund Gibbs, a professor of church growth at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena and an ordained Anglican priest.

It may appear impossible to penetrate the commercial world, where 40% of all sales occur between the day after Thanksgiving and Christmas.

At churches, Advent is often marked by the weekly lighting of candles arranged in a circle inside a wreath. And clergy say more families are practicing similar rituals at home.

In Altadena, Rachel and David Thaxton will use an Advent calendar and the lighting of Advent candles to help their daughters, Ashley, 11, and Colleen, 7, understand the true meaning of Christmas.

“We want the girls to really have an understanding of what Christmas is all about, because in our society it’s so commercialized, and it’s all about what we get,” said Rachel Thaxton, a part-time bookkeeper for a Pasadena law firm. “We use the Advent season as a time to think about the Christmas story and the events that led to the birth of Christ.”

Beginning Monday, the family will gather after breakfast to open the first of 24 doors -- covering Dec. 1 through Dec. 24, Christmas Eve -- on their Advent calendar. Every morning, Ashley and Colleen will open the door for the day and share verses that pop out with the paper flap.

After dinner, the Thaxtons will gather to light an Advent candle, read a portion of the Christmas story from the Bible and sing such Advent songs as “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,” which is based on a Latin hymn from the 12th century.

The calendar is a family tradition cherished by adults and children.

“I enjoy it because, it’s like, each day, when you open the door, there’s a different surprise,” said Ashley. “When Jesus came, he was like a big surprise, he was like a big present. When you think Christmas, a lot of people think it’s Santa Claus. A lot of people don’t know what Christmas is really all about.”

Advent, meaning “arrival” or “coming,” centers on the Old Testament prophecies about the coming of a Messiah.

Theologians say the twofold theme of the Advent season is to be aware of the significance of Christ’s first coming and to be reminded of God’s plans -- that humankind will be held accountable in his Second Coming.

In the first Advent, God came as a baby in Bethlehem’s manger, and in the second, still anticipated Advent, he will return as king of kings to establish his eternal kingdom, according to traditional Christian belief.

“Advent is a time of waiting, a time of longing, a time to prepare our hearts to receive Christ,” said Father Bob Gallagher, pastor of St. Charles Borromeo Catholic Church in North Hollywood. “The four Sundays of Advent are representative of the generations of longing and waiting for the coming Messiah from the Jewish people’s history.”

In recent years, more of the faithful have been attending Advent retreats to mark the season with contemplation.

For instance, Susan Rigby, a veteran Christian educator and a former missionary to Mexico, is leading an all-day Advent retreat today at the Holy Spirit Retreat Center in Encino.

“I am finding that I experience God so much more fully through quiet meditation and introspection,” said Rigby, director of Christian education at First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood.

She believes that many people long to get away from the noise and entertainment that are so much a part of their lives these days.

“We become cluttered not only with materialism and with the commercialization of Christmas, but we become cluttered also in our spiritual journeys,” she said. “We get focused on so many external things that we fail to really concentrate on our internal lives. Jesus was not about outward appearances. He was about what’s going on in the inside of us.”

Through what Rigby calls a “gentle, silent retreat,” attendees “prepare their hearts for the coming of Jesus.”

The preparation for Advent in the Greek Orthodox Church requires moderate fasting or at least eating less, said Father John Bakas, dean of St. Sophia Cathedral in Los Angeles.

So, during Advent his parishioners will keep track of the money they would have otherwise spent on extra food and give it to the poor, he said.

To fully appreciate the true meaning of feasting, there has to be a “contemplative withdrawal from the indulging of the flesh,” he said. “The commercial culture that we live in only satisfies our material being -- our flesh -- but it will never satisfy the needs and the thirst of the soul.”

The idea of giving at Christmas, he said, is to offer gifts that are not always bought.

“Give one the gift of friendship. Give one the gift of love. Give one the gift of time. Give one the gift of companionship,” Bakas said. “The gifts that most people seek cannot be wrapped up in a package.”

At the Church of Our Saviour in San Gabriel, Meredith Wiggins, director of children’s ministries, sent a letter to 60 families with children, suggesting that they use a wreath and candles to conduct an Advent liturgy each Sunday evening.

“Older children can be the leader of the liturgy or the reader,” she wrote. “All children can place the creche figures next to the wreath as they are named.”

A segment in tomorrow’s liturgy stresses that people need four weeks to get ready to enter into a mystery like Christmas.

“During this time we are all on the way to Bethlehem,” Wiggins said. “We are all getting ready to enter the mystery of Christmas, so let’s go with the prophets, the holy family, the shepherds, the angels, the Magi and all the rest to make the journey that was not just back then. It is also now.”