December 12, 2025 // Columns

Embracing the Lessons of Lent During the Season of Advent

Molly Jo Rose

Why as a Catholic is it so easy to be a Lenten people and so hard to be Advent ones?

Last December, I sat in a friend’s living room with a group of seven or eight women to discuss “The Passion of the Infant Christ” by Caryll Houselander. I was resistant to the book for reasons I couldn’t quite explain, but still, it was a cozy book study. The smell of scones invited us as we walked through the door, and peppermint tea from Trader’s Joe’s steamed from mugs. I sipped my tea and tried to deal with my resistance as unobtrusively as possible.

Kathleen, a woman who is so quiet I am often reminded of how loud my life is when I’m around her, led the group with opening questions. These were followed by long silences born not out of a lack of answers but rather a comfort with thoughtful contemplation. After one of these silences, Kathleen asked what I thought of the book. My unobtrusive plans fell away, and I blurted, “I don’t know. I’m struggling with it. I understand Lent so much better than Advent.”

Kathleen laughed softly and nodded in agreement, saying, “That’s a really Catholic thing to say.”

And it really is. The sacrifice of Lent is more comfortable and familiar to me than the profundity of Advent. We are a Crucifix people who focus on the cross far more than the cradle.

We know how to fast. We know how to offer things up. We have all the stations showing us how to lift the cross over our shoulders and trudge toward Calvary. There just aren’t the same actionable steps for Advent that there are for Lent. Or rather, there are plenty of actionable Christmas steps, but very little have anything to do with building a creche inside ourselves for the Infant Christ. On my list of “things to do” – now or in the very recent past – is wrestle with tree lights, make Chex Mix, take screens out of windows to hang wreaths on the house exterior, make Christmas candy, bake pies, shop for family, and get small gifts for the feast of St. Nicholas.

For Lent, conversely, I don’t have to do anything. Not only do I not have to do anything, the whole season is defined by not doing, by deprivation, by less. What a lovely antidote for Christmas, this not doing. I could handle more of the not doing right now.

It’s this less we should embrace this season. In “The Passion of the Infant Christ,” Houselander beautifully marries Lent and Advent. In it, she promotes a quiet, fallow Advent as we wait for Christ. “The law of growth is rest. We must be content in winter to wait patiently through the long bleak season in which we experience nothing whatever of the sweetness or realization of the Divine Presence, believing the truth, that these seasons which seem to be the most empty are the most pregnant with life.”

Despite being full of activity, the season does often feel empty. It feels pregnant with an endless list of things to check off rather than with the promise of new life. Instead of peaceful anticipation, I busy myself with the making of Christmas, that all-consuming job of a parent. The house has to be dazzlingly lit and smell like cookies. Presents have to be carefully curated. There is so much to do that there is no opportunity for not doing, which is necessary for the growth that is inherent to the pregnant Christmas season. The question is: How do I bring in the restfulness of a penitential season into a season of celebration? How do I bring the less of Lent into Advent?

Stillness in any season is a challenge but particularly when Christmas carols ring nonstop. I want to participate in all the shiny merriment but not in ways that leave me empty. I know as a Lenten person that through less, I find more. This is the lesson I need to bring into Advent. I need to let the seed of Christ lie fallow in me if I want to be a part in His birth. Houselander says, “The crib showing the Nativity in all the cities and villages and Catholic homes of the world is not only there to commemorate Christ’s first coming to earth, it is there as a symbol of Christ’s birth in us.”

So, let’s busy ourselves with Christmas preparation in a new way. Let’s embrace our wholly Catholic spirit of Lent and do less. Let’s quietly build our nativities so that the seed of Christ can be born in us. In this season of celebration, let’s commit to becoming an Advent people who finally, if only for this one season, restfully focus on the cradle.

Molly Jo Rose is a writer and English professor living with her husband and three children in Fort Wayne, where they are parishioners at St. John the Baptist. She walks a lot and writes a little.