Questions with Fr. #24: Advent – Its Origins & Methods of Preparing for Families

As we enter the Advent season, listeners submitted questions about Advent, ranging from its history and origins, to how best to celebrate Advent with children, and whether or not it’s ok to put up Christmas decorations during Advent!

Transcript:

Welcome to the SSPX Podcast, delivering sermons, lectures, and the spoken word from across the English-speaking World. On this episode of Questions with Fr., we’re speaking about Advent, the time of the liturgical calendar that is devoted to preparation for the coming of our Savior. Father will answer questions submitted by our listeners on the topic of Advent, ranging from the history of Advent itself (why it’s four weeks instead of forty days for Lent) as well as suggestions on how to make the Advent season more advantageous for children and families. We’ll also discuss the not so commonly known origins behind one of your favorite Advent songs. All this and more is coming up on the SSPX podcast. If you would like to support the SSPX podcast, please visit https://sspxpodcast.com and you can make a donation there. It is free to listen to, but we hope that you can support this endeavor. It takes a great amount of resources, so a monthly gift of $10, $20, or $25 will help us immensely. If you’re unable to donate please subscribe to this podcast on Apple podcasts or Stitcher, and rate the podcast. Leave a review and a rating and that will help more people to see the SSPX podcast in their suggested podcast feed. With that said, we’ll turn now to Father Robinson on the topic of Advent.

We are here with the SSPX podcast – a special edition, I guess we could call it, Father Robinson? – where we are tackling one topic this week with several questions, and that topic is Advent. Hello Father Robinson, how are you?

Doing fine, Andrew!

Very good, and you are in Denver, you are the Prior of Denver as we’ve already discussed and currently traveling around a little bit and we appreciate you making the time to talk with us about these topical questions as we head into Advent.

Glad to be back on, Andrew, and I think this is an important subject coming up on this liturgical season of Advent; this is just such a rich season. There’s a lot we can profit from, I believe.

Absolutely and it’s not one that’s like Lent, where it’s all-consuming, but it is a season where we can, like you’ve said Father, gain some profit and prepare a little bit. We reached out to our faithful and invited them to submit questions on the theme: are there any things you wanted to know about Advent that you didn’t know, or any advice that you would like to ask Father? So we’ll dive right in with the first one on that theme, which is preparing. Are there any good meditations for children, a mother asked, or dinner table discussion topics for kids to get them in the right mind for Advent?

Well, probably a lot of our listeners know that Angelus Press, just a few years ago, produced a book by a Society priest in France, Father Troadec, he was the rector in the seminary in Flavigny for a couple of decades. He put together some meditations from Advent to Epiphany, and of course there’s books for the other times of the Liturgical season. I read the book myself, I found the meditations quite helpful, and I think parents could read that book themselves and get some ideas about how to discuss Advent with their children. And obviously, The Liturgical Year by Dom Guéranger is the go-to resource for anything on the Liturgical year. The first volume of The Liturgical Year by Dom Guéranger is really fantastic to help us understand how the Liturgy forms our spirit at the time of Advent. You know, there’s different times of the year where the Liturgy is more intense. Right now, after the Feast of Pentecost we go to the Sundays after Pentecost, and it’s really a bit of downtime in the Liturgical year, for Liturgical intensity. Things ramp up considerably when we get to Advent, and we start the liturgical year of course with Advent, so it’s a very rich season in the Liturgy in the sense that there is a very careful crafting of the Masses. Also the Divine Office is very rich, so there’s a lot to be gained by actually studying the Liturgy during the time of Advent.

Absolutely and those are great starting points, but taking a step backwards, we can read the liturgical year in these books and start to piece together some things, but what would you say is the guiding principle or overriding theme of the season of Advent?

Well the theme is just simply one of anticipation. Advent of course means “a coming” so we’re waiting for the coming of Our Lord with this sort of joyful anticipation. I think it’s important to point out something I’ve sometimes preached about: it’s a spiritual good that we’re looking for. We recognize that we are sinners, that without a Redeemer we’re completely and utterly lost. We know that God has promised that he’s going to send us a Redeemer and we have this period where we wait, where we’re confident that the promise of God is going to be fulfilled, and we’re begging God to hasten, to come quickly. There are so many times during the season, during the Office, where there’s this very lovely anxiety on the part of the Church, where the Church is saying, “come Lord, don’t delay, don’t take Your time, hasten, come quickly,” and it’s just repeated over and over again. Meanwhile there’s various things the Liturgy does to help us sense the absence of Our Lord; the name of Our Lord is kept out of the of the conclusions of the Collects, you usually hear “per Christum Dominum nostrum” but that doesn’t appear in the Collects for the Sundays of Advent. The Masses of the Advent Sundays are repeated during the week. If there’s a Ferial Day the priest has to repeat the Mass of the Sunday. If people are going to Mass during the week; they get that same Mass over again and it helps keep them in that that Advent mood. And then of course St. John the Baptist is pretty dominant during the Advent season since he appears in the gospels and he has this preaching of penance and preparation; he’s preparing of course the Jews for the coming of Our Lord and in the Liturgical year, the Church uses him to prepare us for the coming of Our Lord as well. We’re sort of in tune with the Liturgy with the Sunday Masses, weekday Masses, and even the Office itself. We’re able to really foster this good spirit of anticipation of the coming of Our Savior.

And is the Church, in setting up the Liturgy the way that they have done, mirroring the anticipation that people had for the coming of the Savior for those four thousand years or so until the birth of Our Lord? Are we kind of doing that same thing in just the four short weeks? There’s kind of a parallel there, I don’t know if it was done on purpose or not but are we kind of marrying that same sort of thing, reliving that same sort of anticipation, just in a much shorter timeframe?

Yes, the whole Liturgical year represents the history of the world. The time of Advent is the time before the coming of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and it can be represented by four different periods, four weeks. Obviously the longest Advent would be four complete weeks, and the shortest Advent would be three weeks and one day if Christmas falls on a Monday. There’s certainly the intention on the part of the Church to think of ourselves as before the coming of Christ and waiting for Him to come during that Advent period, however long it is.

And you were talking about the Liturgy of the Mass, Father. Are there o