By Gary Topping–
“Are you sure there isn’t some kind of indulgence available to those of us who actually get our Advent wreath up by the first Sunday of Advent”?
The proprietor of Immaculate Heart Books in Draper, Utah chuckled at my suggestion as she rang up our new Advent wreath and set of candles. I confessed that some years we hadn’t been that punctual, and got around to it somewhere about the middle of the second week. Advent being a season of anticipation, I observed, the later one gets started, the more diminished that anticipation becomes. She agreed,and rolled her eyes as she told me about a customer she had once who showed up about two days before Christmas to buy a wreath. By that time, what’s left to anticipate?
That evening, as the early winter darkness set in and snow began to threaten outdoors, I set up our breviaries for Evening Prayer at the vigil of the First Sunday of Advent, and we tossed back and forth those ancient psalms and responses of anticipation after lighting our first candle. Our fireplace cast shadows on the walls.
Later, we discussed my suggestion that this year part of our celebration of the season could be watching each Sunday one of our favorite Catholic movies. None of our choices have to do with Advent, but all powerfully direct our thoughts to spiritual things. So yesterday we watched The Mission, about the Jesuits in South America in the 1750s. Our other choices include For Greater Glory, with Andy Garcia, Eva Longoria and Peter O’Toole, about the Cristero movement in Mexico in the 1920s, in which some pretty impious and unlikely candidates found martyrdom, as it were, by the back door. We certainly will include Of Gods and Men, in French and Arabic with subtitles, about the Trappist martyrs of the 1990s in Algeria. Our last choice might be either Black Robe, about the seventeenth century Jesuits in Canada, or The Way, where Martin Sheen plays an accidental pilgrim on the Camino de Santiago in northern Spain.
If any of our readers have yet to solidify their Advent plans, I present ours to you as a suggestion. And if you have other good movies to offer, or even alternate plans altogether, I’d be very happy to hear from you.
Bon Camino! I wish you in my terrible French.
