“Like sands through an hourglass, so are the Days of our Lives!” With these weightily-pronounced words began a popular soap opera when I was younger. Nobody in my house ever watched it; perhaps it was in a break room during my summer job that I saw it. “Life is just one (darn) thing after another” isn’t a bad summary of the outlook behind this platitude, nor of the daily melodramas it introduced.
But real lives, our lives, are not “one darn thing after another.” The Creator God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, loved us into being, and our every moment is an unfolding of the real drama of our coming to know and love Him, even as we are known and loved. We resemble our Creator in that we are free and able to choose and act, and therefore to love. The question each moment brings is, Will I love?
It is easy not to see how these moments add up to lives that tread into eternity. To open our eyes to this reality of our days and our lives, we depend on the sacred liturgy, which presents to us mortals both the divine engagement in time and our participation in the holiness of God, Who is without beginning or end. Liturgical time keeps us from losing sight of how God works in our time and how our time opens to eternity.
Whether simple or silly, or both, one of the joys I find in Advent is seeing the burning candles of the Advent wreath mark of time of this short, blessed season. The first-lit violet candle is precisely one week shorter than the second, which is one week shorter than the pink. This visible, material measure of time is a help to all of us to understand the wait, and the preparation, for the coming of the Savior. Like the Advent calendar, with its daily windows counting down to the Big Day, the Advent wreath is a domestic devotion, a way to bring liturgical timing onto the family home. It summarizes in wax and fire the temporal advance of the Lord Who comes that is spelled out in prophecies, promises, and prayers presented in the Mass and Divine Office.
Days, weeks, seasons, and the year itself are all measures of time, and all are made holy by liturgical worship. Sometimes the chronology is literal, as in the nine months between the Incarnation (Annunciation) and Nativity (Christmas), between the Immaculate Conception and the Nativity of the Virgin; in the intense three days of the Paschal Triduum; in the forty days between Resurrection and Ascension; and the novena from thence to Pentecost. The forty days of Lent are both literal (Christ in the desert) and figurative (Israel’s forty years wandering). And both the arc of the history of salvation and the events of the life of the Savior are spread and represented in the course of one year’s travel round the sun.
Advent’s four-week season is a microcosm of the work of the Sacred Liturgy throughout that year. How can so short a time convey such waiting, and elicit such preparation? Is there any marvel more hidden, yet more closely watched, than the gestation of a child? How this is true of all God’s work for us; and how hard, how inevitable, and how rewarding are the patient anticipation and preparation it teaches us who look for the Lord!
Periods of silence, light and darkness; listening and speaking, bowing and rising, sorrowing and singing; repetition and representation: all form our flesh and manifest the mystery of the eternal God entered into history, and entering our story. Like athletic training, it works our “muscles” for recognizing and responding to the Lord Who comes in the fullness of time.
The wax of a candle is consumed in giving us light, and the child Who will save us from our sins grows in His Immaculate Mother’s womb. Both unfold over time, and both mark that time for eyes to see the victory of light over darkness, and life over death. The gestures and movement of the Sacred Liturgy reveal the divine action, not only in history but also in our life.
Not simply “one darn thing after another,” the drama of our lives is time sanctified by the touch of the immortal, invisible God who comes in our days and in our years to draw us to Himself for all eternity. Though He formed our flesh in an instant from the dust of the earth, He will make it glorious forever through the grace of divine worship, writing immortality on the days of our lives.
Monsignor Smith
