Before Advent begins: Why Catholics need November

Mother Church takes her time. She changes, but that change is slow and gradual. Decisions come slowly, encyclicals make their gradual way to the presses, and canonizations drag on for hundreds of years. Mother Church is a slow moving train, and yet there is wisdom in her pace — we, her impatient children are all the better for it. 

This wisdom is especially evident in the month of November, when the world is chomping at the bit to reach the holiday season. Shopping centers flood their shelves with red and green, Christmas music arrives far too early, and shoppers are reminded to go now! Buy fast! In this season of commercial quickness, Mother Church teaches us to move slowly, presenting the last days of Ordinary Time as a counter-cultural tonic to the frenzy of the times. 

Not festive, but ‘ferial’ 

Much of November is consumed by the color green representing ordinary time, or “ferial days.” These are days in which the Church is not celebrating anything in particular but rather continuing its liturgical cycle at the same pace it always does. While our culture attempts to break down the bounds of various seasons, the Church recognizes that our fasting as well as our feasts have a proper time and place. 

Perhaps this is a result of our American consumerism, which is perpetually chasing the next burst of adrenaline, rush of nicotine, or flash of euphoric endorphins. Perhaps it is due to a rejection of work, a desire to be and do anything else: a form of escape. 

Mother Church rejects both consumerism and escapism. According to Christ Himself, there is a time for feasting and a time for fasting: 

“Then the disciples of John came to him, saying, ‘Why do we and the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast?’ And Jesus said to them, ‘Can the wedding guests mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them? The days will come, when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast.’” (Matthew 9:14-15)

It’s not that feasting is wrong. In the proper time and proper place, Mother Church welcomes feasting with open arms! Think of all the octaves in the Church, or the 40 days of Easter! Yet feasting without fasting is gluttony, and perpetual festivities steal the emotion and meaning from the one which is isolated. Our culture is chasing that Christmas feeling by trying to rush ahead to it — and ultimately stealing its center.

Not appearances, but the hidden life

Our society today values appearance over substance. The average woman in her 20s spends far more money on make-up products than she does on books. So many people live in digital worlds, posting constantly and trying to get the best lighting for photos. 

Yet November is a gift to all of us, not just we who love the quiet, hidden moments of life. It is an opportunity to embrace the little times of steady hard work, discipline, and everyday living that make up the meat of this life and are what we will be judged on in the next. Christ Himself spent 30 years in obscurity, hiding from the world and focusing on His family. Our hidden lives — our Novembers — are where we do the same work. 

As the French writer, Madeleine Debrel, writes in her poem Passion of Patiences:

“This is the way our patiences come,

in serried ranks or in single file,

and they always forget to remind us of the fact

that they are the martyrdom for which we were preparing.

And scornfully we let them pass by,

as we wait for a cause that would be worth dying for.”

If we keep waiting for a big moment to live our lives, then we will never live. If we are always rushing toward Christmas, we will miss the hard work that is to be done in winter. During November, we should eagerly embrace Debrel’s “small patiences,” which she writes, are “those small pieces of the passion whose job it is / to kill us gently for your glory, to kill us without / our getting the glory.” November may not be glamorous or glorious, but it is the stuff of salvation. 

Not instant gratification but purgatorial patience

In her wisdom, Mother Church has declared that November is the month of the poor souls in Purgatory. This month, specially placed to teach us patience, holds up for us as both prayer intention and model, the Church suffering. 

Our patience is nothing to theirs.

The Church teaches that these souls are undergoing incredible pain and torment that they may be purified to stand before God. Saint Catherine of Genoa, in her Treatise on Purgatory, writes:

“So hidden and transformed in God are they, that they rest content with all his holy will. And if a soul, retaining the slightest stain, were to draw near to God in the beatific vision, it would be to her a more grievous injury, and inflict more suffering, than purgatory itself.”

These souls, who long so ardently, with everything they have, to be united to God, suffer and long quietly in a realm not too far from our own. They actually long for the tremendous pain they experience, not in a masochistic way, but because they know it purifies. Catherine continues: “The pain never diminishes, although the time does, but as to the will, so united is it to God by pure charity, and so satisfied to be under his divine appointment, that these souls can never say their pains are pains.”

November can feel like our own personal purgatory. Don’t let that go to waste! This November, work on being where your feet are. Do not begin Christmas before the time has come, but let your life be hidden and quiet, and work diligently for your own salvation and for the alleviation of the souls in Purgatory. God will reward you. Isaiah says as much:

“He gives power to the faint,

    and to him who has no might he increases strength.

Even youths shall faint and be weary,

    and young men shall fall exhausted;

but they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength,

    they shall mount up with wings like eagles,

they shall run and not be weary,

    they shall walk and not faint.” (Isaiah 40:28-31)