Advent as a Way of Discipline

Happily, now that I have returned to the Catholic church,  I pay far more attention to the liturgical calendar and its rhythm through the seasons which reverberate on a far deeper level than the popular calendar.  Today is the first day of Advent, the four weeks before Christmas which, if followed, become a way of discipline that makes more joyous the feast of Christmas.

Joseph Bottum on The End of Advent

Still, the disappearance of Advent seems especially disturbing—for it’s injured even the secular Christmas season: opening a hole, from Thanksgiving on, that can be filled only with fiercer, madder, and wilder attempts to anticipate Christmas.
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A kind of longing pervades the Old Testament selections read in church over the weeks before Christmas—an anxious, almost sorrowful litany of hope only in what has not yet come.
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What Advent is, really, is a discipline: a way of forming anticipation and channeling it toward its goal. There’s a flicker of rose on the third Sunday—Gaudete!, that day’s Mass begins: Rejoice!—but then it’s back to the dark purple that is the mark of the season in liturgical churches. And what those somber vestments symbolize is the deeply penitential design of Advent. Nothing we can do earns us the gift of Christmas, any more than Lent earns us Easter. But a season of contrition and sacrifice prepares us to understand and feel something about just how great the gift is when at last the day itself arrives.
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Maybe that’s what has happened to Christmas. The ideas and the emotions have all broken free and smashed their way across the fields. From Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s I heard the bells on Christmas Day / Their old, familiar carols play to Irving Berlin’s I’m dreaming of a white Christmas / Just like the ones I used to know, there has been for a long time now something oddly backward looking about Christmas music—some nostalgia that insists on substituting its melancholy for the somber contrition and sorrow of forward-looking Advent.

Thanks to the Deacon, I too wait for Advent on my brand new iPhone.  The Deacon quotes from the "good people at Mac"

Advent is a time of preparation and anticipation for the birth of Jesus. Advent is a time of sobriety in the face of His return. The rhythm of American life, especially in the holiday season, seldom leaves time for adequate preparation.

Adequate, however, does not imply the amount of time spent, as much as it refers to focus and attention.

Advent08 is a daily devotional tool to help find focus and discipline attention. It is more than just a way to count down the days to Christmas; it is a way to help transform Advent into a journey of faith.