There is one thing and one thing only that makes me sad, about my family’s transferring to the Byzantine Catholic church: I really like my Advent wreath.
I have a nice stately faux stone Advent wreath with Celtic knots all over it; it’s my pride and joy, one of the only religious items I’ve ever bought new from a catalog instead of scrounging from the thrift store or painting myself. Every year I’ve gone out to get candles for it. Every year I’ve had trouble finding purple and pink candles, because all of the secular stores only carry red, green and white tapers this time of year and the religious bookstore on campus is too expensive. Every year I’ve shaken my head at how few people carry purple and pink for an advent wreath. Every year I’ve watched the candles burning down unevenly like stair steps, dwindling away until Christmas.
This year, we don’t have Advent. We have the Nativity Fast. And the Nativity Fast is six weeks long instead of four, and it’s not symbolized by pink and purple candles in a wreath. We’re two weeks into the Nativity Fast already. I feel kind of awkward getting out the Advent wreath now for a season that’s already a third of the way over.
At least I have no obligation to buy overpriced pink and purple candles.
One thing I am certainly not going to miss, is the preaching at local Latin churches this time of year. I get the impression that everywhere else, the “War on Christmas” has been recognized to be nonsense, but this part of the country never met a bad idea they didn’t like. There are people here who still believe in the Satanic Panic; there are Providentialists who have a dozen children because they think they must; there are Charismatics right out of the 80s who raise their hands and sway during the Gloria In Excelcis Deo; and there are a whole slew of people who still believe that religious freedom for American Christians is under attack. They believe that Catholics are a persecuted minority, and that the epitome of their persecution is when someone in a secular setting wishes them “happy holidays.”
My old pastor once made my hair stand on end by ending a homily with, “And, you know, when you go out to dinner with someone at a restaurant, and you pray, you know, and they don’t like it, they don’t like that you’re praying, and they roll their eyes? Well, that’s persecution. That’s a persecution we have to suffer. And our reward will be great in Heaven.”
And at Advent and Christmas, he was sure to have something to say about the secular persecution of Christmas; last year he was thrilled to report that he had heard “happy holidays” hardly at all, and shopkeepers were telling him “Merry Christmas.”
He’s not trying to be cute. He truly, honestly believes that “happy holidays” and the occasional side-eye are persecutions, sufferings for which we will be greatly rewarded in Heaven.
I don’t miss that church.
Our new pastor is from Ukraine. He’s a Ruthenian Catholic from a country where the vast majority of people are Orthodox; his country was still part of the Soviet Union when he was born. He studied for the priesthood at a seminary named after Blessed Theodore Romzha, a Byzantine Catholic Bishop who was beaten half to death and eventually poisoned by the KGB for refusing to convert to Russian Orthodoxy.
So far, he hasn’t preached to us about the War on Christmas or how it’s a persecution to have to hear shopkeepers say “happy holidays.” And somehow I don’t think he’s going to.
I think he has a different idea of what persecution means.
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