When the Scottish martyr, St. John Ogilvie, was imprisoned, the cruellest torture he received was sleep deprivation. He was poked with sticks to stop him from nodding off. The torturers wanted him to become mentally confused and start betraying the names of other Catholics, but he resisted.

When Jesus and St. Paul tell us to stay awake, they don’t mean to torture us by depriving ourselves of physical sleep! They mean that we stay spiritually alert and work at keeping ourselves awake for, and aware of, the person of Christ. At times we are inclined to think of the figure of Christ as a mental image, a literary figure, an artistic theme, a statue, as if He were at a distance from our “real world.” But Christ is real, He puts the real in reality. He is present, His Word is still alive and active for us personally, the blessings of His death and resurrection are still as available to us as they were to Mary and John and the Good Thief. He knows and loves each one of us in all the details of our personal lives. Christ, and St. Paul echoing Him, wants us to take Christ seriously, more seriously than we take ourselves and all the other people and activities of our everyday lives. He wants us to live in His presence, actively to believe and hope in His love, to share our minds, hearts, bodies and souls with Him, to take our decisions in the light of His will and that we live, love, suffer and die united to Him.

Christ wants us to be alive to Him now, every moment of every day, and not just as we draw closer to death. It’s only necessary and right, of course, that we are alert and alive to those we love and to our various daily responsibilities. Yet it is possible to do that while still being more deeply aware of Christ within us, in our loved ones and in our daily work or suffering. Christ wants to be the backdrop, the “background music”, of our lives. He wants to be the horizon of our minds and hearts as we think, reflect, decide, act and love. Remember that we were created by Him and for Him, and that we live in Him. He is the ground of our being and holds us in existence. He embraces and envelopes us at every moment, even when we fail Him or feel He is not there. Whether we grasp it or not, we are alive with Christ.

The kind of sleep Christ and St. Paul want us to avoid as we await the Lord’s coming at the end of our lives, or at the end of time, is religious, spiritual and moral sleep. Whenever we renew our baptismal promises we respond, ‘I do’ when we are asked: ‘do you reject sin and the fascination of evil?’ To fascinate means to bewitch or cast a spell. Sometimes today you get the impression that people are spellbound, hypnotized, by the attraction of evil and sinful lifestyles. It’s not that they don’t know about Christ. It’s that uppermost in their priorities, their feelings, their preferences, their values, are things of this world. Many of these things can be legitimate enough in themselves, such as work, earning a good wage, having a good social life, but what happens is that such things seize hold of the heart. Little by little they push out any remaining vestiges of the centrality of Christ and of the worship and honour we owe to Him alone. The world becomes everything and Christ becomes superfluous or at best marginal. When that happens, we are spellbound in a form of religious, spiritual and moral sleepwalking. And if someone dares to point that out, they are told not to exaggerate since no-one likes being told that they have been hoodwinked, scammed by the enemy of the soul. The demands of Christ are watered down to the bare minimum, a minimum which is always comfortable and tailored to suit personal tastes. The Gospel is emptied of its urgent call to conversion and of the Cross. Christ is reduced to a “nice guy” who won’t mind our lack of commitment to serious conversion of life, of heart and of soul because He is merciful, as if mercy cost nothing and meant even less.

But Christ does call us to repent and believe in the Gospel of His Cross and resurrection, not merely to be “good people” in our own eyes or by the standards of the world. His Cross and Resurrection are not dim and distant actions of the past with no relevance to how I live my life and my love today. Christ is crucial (from “crux” = cross) to my sense of identity, to the purpose of my life, whether I know it or not, accept it or not. If He is not the meaning of who I am, then, in the end, I have no meaning at all. Any meaning my life might have had will perish when I die.

In Advent, the Church relays to us Christ’s urgent call, echoed by St. Paul, to stay awake, to focus and refocus my life once again on Christ, on His eternal love for me, on His will for me, on His presence to me. Advent is not primarily about preparing for Christmas, for His first coming, but about preparing for the Parousia, that is, His second coming. It’s easy and safe to focus on His first coming, because it’s a “lovely wee story”, it reminds us with nostalgia of bygone family gatherings and gives us a chance to try and reproduce them today. Indeed, it’s almost as if we all become children again for a short time and in some ways. And perhaps that’s precisely the problem: we can infantilise Christmas and collapse its enormous significance for the salvation of humanity into being a merely human celebration of commercial and sentimental self-indulgence. If we use Advent merely to prepare for, and often to anticipate earlier and earlier, this distorted view of Christmas, we have fallen into a deep sleep and are leaving Christ once more out in the cold because we have no room for Him at our inn. We have no room for Him in “our” Christmas. But the truth is that He will come in anyway, and we might well not be ready.

I invite and encourage one and all, me included, to rescue Advent and Christmas itself from ways of celebrating them which stop us from living their true meaning and gaining the spiritual gifts Christ wants for us. Let us let Advent be Advent and Christmas be Christmas. Let the “purple” graces of penance, prayer, almsgiving and fasting prepare us in Advent for the “white” graces of joy, celebration, wonder and praise of Christmas. Keep the tree and decorations down until the last week of Advent. Limit the parties. Give more time to your spiritual lives. Seek silence and recollection. Let the Lord train you further in the spiritual skills of waiting, longing and hoping for His coming. Let our staying awake for Him intensify our love for Him. Waiting expectantly stretches the heart and makes it restless and hungry for Him. If we at least try to do these things, we won’t be worried about the day or the hour of His coming, for we will be fully and eagerly ready for Him at whatever time He chooses to come. So, have a grace-filled Advent! And, at the proper time, a grace-filled Christmas!