Fr Dan Harding reflects on Advent preparations in a parish in Chile.
What are we going to do about Advent this year?” asked Amelia. "Soon it will be Christmas and Advent will pass without noticing."
Amelia is the president of the parish liturgy team in the parish of “Jesús de Nazaret”, in Lo Espejo, a suburb in a poor area of Santiago, Chile.
“Have you noticed the shops in town are full of toys, coloured lights and Christmas decorations already,” replied Maria. "The message on TV is to go into debt to buy all your Christmas needs. My daughter’s school has already started writing letters to Santa Claus."
"The Christmas traffic and delays will begin soon," added Jorge, "not to mention the summer heat over Christmas."
“But what about Advent?” asked Amelia again. “How are we going to celebrate Advent which begins in two weeks time? She then turned to me, "As our parish priest, what do you think, Padre?”
Up until this point, I had remained silent. I could easily hear and understand everyone’s frustration about Christmas and how Advent can slip by.
“While coming together and sharing gifts with loved ones is one of the many good things about Christmas, at the same time we have to make a conscious effort to put Christ at the centre of our celebration." I replied. "We can do this by committing ourselves to intentionally live the four week season of Advent and its spirituality as a way to prepare us for the coming of Christ."
For the next one and a half hours we discussed the many ways that we as a parish community could truly live and celebrate the Advent season intentionally. We then came up with the following ideas which we put into practice during Advent.
Firstly, we made sure to prepare well our Advent symbols and decorations in the Church. With the help of children from the parish, we prepared a large Advent Wreath with its three violet and one rose candle on it. The violet colour of Advent represents hope, expectation, waiting, yearning, liberation, royalty and the need to be prepared and matches the colour of the violet flowers of the Jacaranda trees in flower at this time all over Santiago. The rose coloured candle for the third Sunday of Advent represents joy, the joyful anticipation of the coming of the Messiah. We made drapes from these two colours and hung them in different parts of the Church.
We placed our Jesse Tree in a prominent part of the church sanctuary. At the beginning of the Sunday Liturgy each week of Advent we placed the corresponding figures and ornaments upon it, representing the journey of faith through history towards the coming of the Messiah in the stable in Bethlehem 2000 years ago.
We had members of the youth group draw large images of the important Advent figures from the Bible such as David, Isaiah, Baruch, Nehemiah, Hosea, Micah, John the Baptist, Mary, Joseph, Zechariah, Elizabeth, the Shepherds and the Magi. These images were framed in violet and rose colours and were placed on a Church wall. Every Sunday as people arrived for the Eucharist, they were given a small image of one of these Advent Biblical figures with the corresponding texts to look up during the following week.
Secondly, we asked each family to celebrate Advent in their homes with their own Advent Wreath and/or Jesse Tree, accompanied by a small prayer service each evening. We made sure Advent Calendars were on sale at the Church for families to use in their homes each day of Advent.
Thirdly, and most importantly, we did everything we could to help our parishioners develop an Advent spirituality, as a way to prepare for the coming of Christ at Christmas and in glory at the end of time. We did this through homilies, meetings, an afternoon of reflection and an Advent workshop.
The parishioners were asked to reflect on the theme of waiting, just as the Jewish people in the Old Testament waited with great anticipation for the coming of the Messiah. What does it feel like to wait, to joyfully anticipate the coming of God now into our lives and our world? We asked people caught in Christmas traffic jams, for example, to try to understand the spiritual concept of what waiting, yearning and anticipating God's intervention in history felt like.
Do we feel the need for a Saviour in our own lives and in our world? Was the coming of Jesus in history needed? Was it worth waiting for? Why? How? Where are the areas of darkness in our world and our lives that await the coming of the light of the Messiah?
When Christmas Day came, I was speaking with a group of parishioners after Mass on Christmas morning. I asked them whether they were able to use the Advent season as a way to help them prepare for a Christmas that was focused on the coming of Christ as Messiah, as Saviour.
A reply from one of the women hit the mark. She said, "As I walked around the parish, I noticed the despair of the unemployed and the loneliness of the bed ridden sick waiting a friendly visit. I saw an indigenous family being discriminated against and I saw the abandoned aged poor. I saw young drug addicts living at death's door.
"It struck me more than ever that our world and our lives truly need the light of Christ, our Saviour. We as a parish desperately need to continue the Kingdom work begun by Christ during His first Advent and keep going until He comes in glory to complete His Kingdom at His second Advent.
"Christmas, the coming of the baby Jesus at Bethlehem, never meant so much to me as it did this year."
Columban Fr Dan Harding is the Editor of The Far East. He worked for many years in Chile.
LISTEN TO: Reflection - Soon it will be Christmas (Duration: 7:07mins, MP3, 3:26MB) |