So Advent begins again: the first great penitential season of the year. In the better monasteries it’s still a season of fasting. I am not sure we do much to avert to its penitential mood any more in the average parish beyond the purple vestments for Mass.
After the excesses of Black Friday and with the Ghost of Christmas Yet-to-Come rattling his chains on every shopping street, some kind of fast is appropriate. It might even be self-interested if my desire this Christmas is to understand more fully the truth expressed by St Augustine, that “God was made man that man might be made God.”
