This term comes to us from the Latin "Advenio," meaning "to come to," and refers to the season immediately preceding Christmas.   Unlike the other distinct seasons in our liturgical calendar, Advent does not have a fixed duration.   It can be as long as twenty-eight days or contain a meager twenty-one, but always includes four Sundays.

However, unlike the mental gymnastics required to calculate when Easter falls, figuring out the time which spans the timeless season of Advent is fairly easy math.   Advent always begins on the Sunday nearest the feast of St. Andrew the Apostle (November 30th.)   In 2003, since the Sunday nearest St. Andrew's is December 3rd, Advent has only twenty-two days.

Originally, Advent was celebrated as a kind of "Diet Lent."   Originally this time of reflection and anticipation was only one week; Advent began the week before Christmas and was over in the blink of an eye, liturgically speaking that is.   However, as the focus on preparation became more pronounced, the season of Advent was extended to forty-days, thus mimicking the season of Lent, and taking on all of its penitential practices and implications.

But the church, in her wisdom, rightly discerned that while Advent should be a time of preparation, it had a different character than Lent.   The forty days we spend in the spiritual wilderness might be appropriate preparation for our journey to new life through the cross, but it is not the appropriate character for the season of Advent. For in Advent, we do not await resurrection.

Rather, we look with eager longing for incarnation, the time when God embraces our humanity by becoming one of us.   This is a whole different ball of wax, as the principal liturgical symbol of Advent suggests.   For in Advent, it is light, and its waxing illumination in our hearts and lives that best symbolize the journey of preparing God to dwell in us.   The darkness of our lives, attested to both in terms of the ever decreasing hours of daylight and by the malaise that tends to creep into our souls, is meant to be over-come by the light of Christ that gradually illumines and conquers all darkness.

We light a candle each week in Advent so that we may feel the peace and light of God's presence growing in us.   In this way Advent is about dispelling the shadows that obscure all that God can be and do in us.   This process is timeless.

In Advent, we relive the anticipation of Christ having taken on our flesh in the incarnation; we long for the return of that embrace in the here and now; and we look with expectation toward the fullness of time, when all darkness will be conquered and the fullness of God's presence will dwell among us, forever and always.   In Advent we ponder the boundless mystery of the one who came, who comes, and who will come again!