We put up no Christmas decorations until Christmas Eve. Our neighbors, indeed the rest of the world we live in, make little of Advent. That holy season gets lost in an anticipated Christmas. The result is both the loss of Advent and the loss of Christmas. For by the time the Birth comes, all are long since weary of it and have had enough of it. —The way of the world.

Our own entrance into Advent is not only more realistic, but also far more mystical. In the mysteries of our Faith we are not time-ridden, though it may seem so for all our insistence on a proper observance of the seasons. Yet unless there be a proper respect for time, there is no possibility of moving beyond it into God's time: mystical time, spiritual time — in a word, God's Now.

For in the Birth of Christ, we are not celebrating a birthday, as you might mine or yours. It is another matter altogether.

We do not merely commemorate. We are present at the original event, for we enter into the myth of  the Christian story, which is at once mythical and historical. This makes the Christian experience utterly unique.

Jesus was born on a certain day in a certain place of a certain woman. It is all factual and essentially so. But the facts are transcendent, are beyond time, outside of time. Not poetically, as it were, in fancy, but in truth.

So our response to the feast is of enormous significance. Our response to it is every bit as historical as it would have been had we been there as one of the shepherds.

If all this seems a bit much when put so blandly, all the more reason to rejoice in it. Our faith makes enormous, even outrageous demands of us. Yet if you back away from any of it, you are much the less for it.

We are after all, immortal — that in itself is an almost incredible foundation of our faith, yet one we assent to. From then on, we are expected to make great leaps of trust in what we have been taught.

And in so doing are immensely enriched, nurtured, nourished. Pondering such depths is extremely healthy. To live bereft of such considerations means only an impoverished life without depth that leads only to unhappiness, no matter what the surface life be. Such a life will not wear. Will not deliver. So many are so long learning that, and by the time they are confronted with the truth, are unable to accept it.

So great is the urge to believe in a world more than this one that people will believe in almost anything that makes a pretense of being authentic. It would seem theology as theology is not as important as faith. Once a people have assented to a body of presumed religious truths they will then get busy with the practical side of creating a decent life. They let the theology be.

As Christians, however, as Catholics endowed with the Faith, we stress not only the need to give expression to that Faith in daily life, but place great importance on the body of revealed truth, insist in its validity, go to enormous lengths to establish its credentials, and further, in worship and contemplation make the truths of our Faith the source of our converse with God. We would insist that what we teach is not only true, but can be proven true.

The Faith then becomes an engagement of this world and the next, in a mix of relationships that give life great beauty and significance. It can be considered a holistic attempt to live a truly human life in which interaction with Heaven is not considered an escape, but a plunge into the heart of life in which we discover Heaven here, Christ in our midst, Christ here: the Christ who lives, teaches, suffers, dies with us, and rises to a glory that will assuredly be ours as we are His.

To live then as soul and body, as spirit and matter, with proper reverence to each is our call. And so to enter into time with reverence and wonder, time made holy by God becoming temporal, time made sacred for the mysteries of Christ's life here begun to end in time.

Hence to be casual about Advent is to be flippant with holy things, is to dishonor time, treat Christ's presence in it as a light matter. Keep Advent then, and await the Coming of the Lord, for He truly comes, has come, and will come again at the end of time.

Here is how a theologian puts the same matter:

"While the saving merits of Christ's incarnation, obedient life, suffering, death, resurrection and ascension happened once for all for our salvation, they are also operative for the present Church and are experienced in a unique but not exclusive way through the liturgy. By their nature these saving mysteries that happened once in historical time also transcend historical time in the sense that they are able to be experienced here and now. They perdure as saving events; they are not repeated or re-enacted in the liturgy. Once-for-all events that occurred in saving history are thus regarded as trans-temporal and meta-historical in that they are also annually appropriated and fully experienced at particular feasts and seasons, such as Easter and Christmas. —Thus the liturgical year does not recount a biography of Jesus; rather, in liturgical celebration the Church enters into the saving events that make up the paschal mystery (past, present, and yet to come) and is transformed by them. Thus liturgical memorial is never merely a present experience of Christ's past saving mysteries. It is also future time experienced now ('thy Kingdom come...' ) and the eternal future of God invoked to bring chronological time to an end." ( * )

(*) From "Liturgy" in New Catholic Dictionary of Spirituality, p.606