On fire with hope

What are your best Advent memories?

You’ve got some, right?

Maybe it was that time your family lit the candles on the Advent wreath at Mass. Or the time you put up a Jesse tree. No, not a Christmas tree. Not during Advent.

My most vivid Advent memory is probably knocking over one of the candles at dinner and setting the Advent wreath on fire. I don’t know exactly how old I was — 10, maybe? But I was certainly clumsy enough to have done that when I was older. All I know is that we managed to put it out before the curtains on the window next to the table caught fire, and what could have been a tragedy remained a funny story.

But really, I don’t have a lot of specific memories of Advent. There are more for Lent: Ash Wednesday services during CCD classes, which were conveniently held on Wednesday evenings; trying to hold myself to Lenten sacrifices, whether that meant not watching TV on a certain day or not eating chocolate; even adding change to the little cardboard carton for Catholic Relief Services’ Operation Rice Bowl.

Advent, though, has always been hard to differentiate from the run-up to Christmas. We spend lots of time preparing for Christmas: shopping, baking, decorating, wrapping. But it all misses the point of the prayerful hope that is supposed to be part of the Advent season.

Hope, that is, for the coming of the Messiah, of the Savior whose life, death and resurrection will bring us to eternal life. Not hope for the latest video game console or a new laptop under the tree.

Maybe we Christians are victims of our own success. We know the Messiah came. Jesus was born, lived, died and was resurrected. It can be hard for people to reflect on their hope for something that already happened. It’s kind of like something a priest once told me during a parish Bible study on Revelation: You have to read it through the lens of knowing that we’ve already won.

But salvation is not something that happens once and is over. It’s something we are called to, constantly, again and again. We can always make more room for Jesus in our hearts and in our homes.

And, yes, we can make room in the hectic run-up to Christmas for Advent as well. I won’t tell you not to indulge in an Advent calendar with a piece of chocolate behind each little door; I would never tell you to avoid chocolate, Lent notwithstanding. But maybe use that daily ritual as a reminder to pray, to welcome the love of Christ into your life.

You can use any number of devotional aids, whether in book form or online or any other way you can think of. You can make a point of lighting the Advent wreath every day. Just make a point of looking at the light, and finding hope.