Among the joys of living in Romania — and they are many — is the month of December. For many Romanians, and especially for observant members of the Orthodox church, this is a time of fasting and penitence, a time for sobriety and devotion. It is quite different from the experience that most Western Christians have of the season we call Advent.
In the United States, the end of November (beginning, precisely, on the day after our Thanksgiving) begins a frenzy of shopping, decorating, party-going and so forth. It is a month of school concerts and Christmas-pageant rehearsals; a month of office parties laden with fake jollity; a month in which retailers scramble to move their stock, and shoppers scramble for bargains. It is a month so busy that many people lack the time or energy to breathe, much less to pray.
Romania isn’t shockingly different. There are holiday decorations on the boulevard, and Iulius Mall is bustling with commercial energy. But the scale is much more modest than Americans are accustomed to. And at the same time, every restaurant offers a meniu de post; one’s friends often decline a meal or a dessert with the polite reminder that they are fasting. Underneath the bustle, there are constant reminders of devotion.
It is just the way Advent was meant to be.
Historically, of course, the season leading up to Christmas was a time of penitence and fasting in the West as well. And why not? Its theme is the return of Christ in glory, a thing for which one wants to have a clean conscience and a healthy prayer life. The connection to other great penitential season, which precedes Easter, was clear to everyone. Early records (from a time when the season began earlier) identify it as “St. Martin’s Lent.” The liturgical color was, and remains for most of the world, Lenten violet.
When did we lose sight of all this? I don’t know. It was doubtless the work of years, even centuries, as the importance of Christmas grew beyond the boundaries of a religious observance to shape first academic calendars, then business strategies. I suppose Protestantism had something to do with it — although, despite Calvinism’s historic unease about the church calendar, the Second Helvetic Confession, a central document of the Calvinist tradition, goes out of its way to endorse fasting as a form of spiritual discipline. So maybe it has more to do with capitalism.
In any case, we all know in our hearts that the December of the West isn’t right. We know that a month of running madly hither and yon is no way to make the Lord’s way straight. We know that when Jesus comes, there are things he would rather find us doing than shopping. This is the theme of an endless number of sermons and the endless urging to “keep the Christ in Christmas” and so forth.
But maybe the problem isn’t Christmas, exactly. A lot of the craziness ends on December 24, as people finally make it to church, and fall backward onto the relative comfort of a church-pew. Maybe the problem is an Advent that has strayed from its abstemious roots to become a time of excess, and traded its devotional nature for one of worldliness.
So what do we do to reclaim Advent, and with it perhaps a bit of our souls? In theory, it is as easy as listening to the Bible readings that begin the season: Watch and pray. Keep awake. Be ready, for in such an hour as you know not, the Son of Man will come. In practice, it means setting aside generations of training, and the nearly universal customs of our society. Can we do it? Maybe not, or maybe not completely. But it may be that even the effort will be the beginning of a revolution.
