From Now Until Christmas
Today is December 17, the date that marks the start of Sapientiatide. This liturgical season is the final lead-up to Christmas and includes the three Ember Days we’ll be observing this coming week. A fourth day of fasting and abstinence, Christmas Eve, also falls during Sapientiatide, although this year it happens to be a Sunday so the fast is not observed. However, let’s just note that in the brief (seven-day) period between December 17 and 24, a majority of the days are, usually at least, penitential days of fast. Sapientiatide, in other words, is a time of penance.
When we do penance in Lent and Passiontide we know exactly the reason why. We are repentant for the sins of our life and seek to make reparation for them. We also commit to following the sufferings of our Blessed Lord by voluntarily observing sufferings that we choose for ourselves. But the repentance of Advent is different, although it has similarities. We are essentially doing penance in reparation for the sin of Adam and for the fall of human nature through his original sin. All the wickedness of our own lives and that of all men stems from this and we wish to show God our shame for the sin of our first father and mother and make reparation for it, aware of the tremendous burden they laid upon their descendants with the slamming shut of the gates of heaven.
For four thousand years mankind lived under this heavy weight, knowing that when they died they would be unable to enter heaven. God’s chosen people lived in expectation of a Messiah who would come and redeem them from their plight, a Saviour who would take away the sins of the world and reopen heaven to all believers. On Christmas Night, that Saviour would be born, as prophesied, to a Virgin Mother in a town called Bethlehem. Other prophecies were fulfilled during the course of this Saviour’s lifetime, enough to prove that here, finally, was the Son of God come to deliver his people from their sin.
The sheer joy of Christmas, so happily anticipated on this Gaudete Sunday, is an expression of the rejoicing demanded by our coming Redemption. But first, between now and Christmas we must commemorate the last few years, months and days before our Saviour’s birth, the end times before those gates of heaven would be reopened to those who kept the faith and that treasured hope in their deliverance. We observe this time with small gifts of fasting and other acts of atonement, using these as starting points to offer other Christmas gifts to our God who is so good and deserving of all our love—the gift of ourselves, of our free will freely sacrificed to our Messiah, that little Child in a manager who will dwell with us next week and lead us through those open gates.