Dear Friend,

Reflection by Rev. Doug Milewski, S.T.D.

The Stepchild Season

Advent is the “stepchild” season, like heroes in those stories we know.  From Cinderella to Harry Potter, orphans who cannot be forsaken, yet not wanted for their own sake, whose presence reminds us of another story, but one whose real meaning we let go.

Like those characters in those tales, often reduced to menial tasks, Advent comes in each year with no fanfare, only to announce there’s work to be done.  Unlike Lent with its public ashes and personal penances and purposefully picked “giving ups”, Advent concentrates on its private cleaning-ups and everywhere straightening-ups and interior lifting-ups.  Cleaning up – to receive a greater guest than we ever deserved.  Straightening up – to make straight the highway of His creation to hasten His appearance.  Lifting up – to rise to His level from the very depths of our hearts.

Without question there is room enough for penance here just as in Lent.  But in this season, the accent falls on conforming more than on atoning.  In this season more than others, the liturgy fixes on the promises God made through His prophets whose images seem like wild dreams.  The wolf and the lamb abiding together.  The child safely laying his hand on the adder’s lair.  Swords and spears beaten into plows and pruning hooks.  The web woven over all the nations – death itself – finally destroyed.   

Sursum corda!  No wonder we’re told: “Lift up your hearts!”  Because the things of this passing light and of human devising can never provide that, but only leave us cast down and broken-hearted.  The events of the day repeatedly confirm this.  But to conform to the things of Heaven’s eternal light and of God’s devising – this is what “stepchild” Advent enters this world again this year to offer and teach once more.  Not for its own sake, but for the sake of a true Christmas of vaster joy than anything we’re used to.

“Stepchild” Advent reminds us we were all stepchildren and orphans once, until the One Who made those wild promises appeared to deliver on them in a way beyond all dreams, and to have us His newly adopted children share in making this wonder known.  Whatever those fictional stepchildren did in those stories pales in comparison to the actual wonder to be revealed through God’s children.

“Stepchild” Advent kindly reminds us: What heroes do in storybooks, the saints do (and much, much more) in real life.

Sursum corda!       

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Rev. Douglas Milewski, S.T.D., Associate Professor of Undergraduate Theology, earned an S.T.B. in Theology from the Pontifical Gregorian University, Rome, and an S.T.L. and an S.T.D. in Patristic Sciences and Theology from the Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum of the Pontifical Lateran University, Rome. His doctoral dissertation is titled “‘Nos Locus Dei Sumus.’ Augustine’s Exegesis and Theology of John 17 in the Light of In Evangelium Ioannis Tractatus CIV-CXI.” Father Milewski’s specializations include the theology, literature and history of early Christianity and the Fathers of the Church, in particular, Saint Augustine.