December 1: And it is lit

I almost forgot about Advent, and I have no idea why. It’s absolutely my favorite tradition at my favorite time of year. I adore ritual—I may have said that somewhere before—because rituals develop over time to allow us to re-see an ever-present truth.

As I mentioned in the preface to this blog series, the Catholic Advent finds its roots in Roman, pagan, and agrarian traditions that find their roots in the movement of the sun and the experience of the seasons. Even though the luxuries many of us enjoy in our modern world have made our bodies largely immune to the consequences of the seasons, our spirits still respond. Our collective memory and desire for meaning continue to honor solstices and equinoxes—Christmas and Easter—their beauty and their injustice (birth in the winter, death in the spring).

Yet my mind almost forgot.

I got distracted by Mercedonius, which I have previously explored here and here. Mercedonius is a step out of time—an artificial month that allows us to catch up with the seasons and the sun. So, actually, I wasn’t far off in thinking about replacing December with Mercedonius and giving myself time to retreat and catch up with life in preparation for the new year. It’s just that billions of souls over thousands of years had the idea before me, and now we call it Advent.