December 19, 2004

Advent's reality check bids us examine our consciences: Are we genuinely meditating upon the Four Last Things of Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell in preparation for the glorious mystery of the Incarnation of Christ, or are we wallowing in the byways of obligatory cocktail parties, shopping frenzies, and papier mâché North Poles?

I continue to be amazed at the number of people, usually late middle-aged, disappointed in their domestic existences, who invoke an ephemeral "Spirit of Vatican II" never intended by that or any Ecumenical Council, as a futile imprimatur for their private alternatives to reality. They are fading, and in their wake are younger people either ardent in their attempt to recover solid truth or ignorant that there is such truth but willing to have it explained to them. The vacuous remnants of the 1970s' social detritus have a hard time understanding what has happened to their theosophical fantasies. A lot of religious orders have succumbed and are consequently disintegrating, as they did in the sixteenth century before the vital reforms of such as Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross. They do not convert others, nor do they reproduce, but they do decay and die. Their spiritual dilettantishness has unleashed ennui, spiritual sadness, and moral chaos, not to mention the death which is the consequence of sin. Some of them try to fill the vacuum of their spiritual emptiness through old superstitions, warmed-over oriental forms of Gnosticism, "holistic retreats," "labyrinths," and worship of the Winter Solstice.

Christmas enlightens the pagan Druid in haunted souls; it does not perpetuate their ignorance. It is only natural, like the earnest pagans, to be oppressed by darkness and to revere the light. As the days grow shorter, we are reminded that this is a moral perception: physically, every day lasts twenty-four hours, and the sense of "shortness of days" is the moral perception that light and life go together. The sun is a creature. God is its Creator. God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself. Christ is the Light of the World. There are four kinds of light: the physical which impacts the retina with a perception of objects; the intellectual which identifies those objects; the prophetic which interprets the meaning of those objects; and the ultimate divine light which explains the source and goal of everything. Christ is that divine light, shining in darkness. St. John, whose own eyes saw it, proclaims that the darkness of illusion and sin has never overcome it. The darkness would seep into our lives through the crack opened by pride: sure signs are indifference to sin, a melancholy of spirit, a lassitude of will, contempt for beauty and truth, indifference to Heaven and disbelief in Hell. The only one who can save us from all that is God, and so at Christmas the Church thanks Him.

Fr. George W. Rutler