Holidays. Holy Days.

by Joseph Wolyniak, Missioner for Discipleship & Theological Education

For most of us, the holiday season goes something like this: frantic travel to-and-fro, Thanksgiving gorge-fest, frenetic shopping, list-crossing, gift-wrapping, tree-dressing, present-sharing, picture-taking, church-going, Christmastide repast, pause, more frantic travel, New Year’s (making it to midnight if you’re lucky), half-hearted resolution-making, then back to work.

It all happens in the blink of an elfin eye… quicker than you can blurt “Happy Holidays!” to the next passerby who greets you with the same.

We tend to refer to this free-for-all as “the holidays,” notably in the collective. It is as if the whole month-plus season is thrown into a blender and emulsified into a festal mush — holiday after holiday whooshing by, one moment indistinguishable from the next. Fitting, then, that the very word “holidays” is but a contraction of “holy days,” rammed together into single term with nary a breath space between.

The temptation in this ever-busy season is to slip into a state of heedless acquiescence, mechanically muddling through from one thing to the next until we’ve made it through the whiz and whirl. All too quickly we can find ourselves adrift — dragged out of any spiritually regardful state, lost amid trifling hustle and bustle.

If we are to more than just survive this season, if we are to thrive spiritually in these holy days, we must begin by seeing Advent as a time set apart from all other time. A time of intentional waiting amidst otherwise frenzied doing, slowing down to wrest ourselves from the dizzying busyness. A time when we re-center ourselves, stretched as we are in a million different directions with manifold demands. Recalling the story of our salvation — from God’s faithfulness to Israel to Mary’s yes — we take this time to reawaken anticipation. Immanuel has come and will come again. We need only be.

Being still in the presence of God, especially in this season that demands so much, will help us recapture the oft-neglected invitation at the heart of Advent: to a deepened spiritual practice. Advent is not just a season; it is a virtue, a vigilant discipline that tends the rekindling of hope. This stretch of intentional waiting and heedful recollection summons us to daily conversion and surrender, a reorientation of our lives away from the meaningless and towards the truly meaningful. And there is no better time than this preoccupied present to begin.

Cultivating this Advent virtue will not be easy, as Anglican theologian Evelyn Underhill reminds us:

Virtue, perfect rightness of correspondence with our present surroundings, perfect consistency of our deeds with our best ideas, is hard work. It means the sublimation of crude instinct, the steady control of impulse by such reason as we possess; and perpetually forces us to use on new and higher levels that machinery of habit-formation, that power of implanting tendencies in the plastic psyche, to which man owes his earthly dominance.

But here is the good news: we do not have to go at it alone. God has already met us more than halfway. Our task, in these holy days, is simply to breathe, make space, pray. And, in so doing, open our hearts to receive the true gift of God’s abundant grace always and everywhere on offer — if hidden in plain sight amidst these hurried holidays.

This Advent, may we not fall prey to mere plodding and purchasing. May we instead truly live into the Advent virtue of presence and prayer, receiving all God has to give.