Though I obviously wasn’t around to know firsthand, I do know this: people in the Middle Ages, from the very rich to the very poor, lived the liturgical seasons and celebrated the feasts of the Church.

(In fact, at one point a law was enacted limiting the number of feasts. There had gotten to be so many that people weren’t getting their work done!)

Even the starkness of Lent is life-giving, and every year when the season begins, the sense of still another chance to begin again never fails to excite me.

As I write this, we at Madonna House are in the midst of Advent. (This newspaper, because of Christmas, is even more ahead of time than usual.) It may seem strange to you to read about Advent when Lent is about to begin, but if I am to give you our news of the past month, most of what I have to say will be about Advent—even though this is the February issue.

Advent here is a very rich season, and we are busy, busy, busy. The author from the news magazine might well call it "drudgery," but oh, the feeling of life and expectation, the creativity that Advent is bringing forth!

The Mass readings are unending sources of meditation, and our Advent hymns are so hauntingly beautiful and so filled with longing. Every evening we light the Advent Wreath, and in every corner of the house, staff, guests, and applicants are preparing for Christmas and the feasts of Advent.

We’ve had a couple of evening work bees for whoever wished to participate—to make maple sugar out of maple syrup, and to make tortillas for our Mexican supper for the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

The schola is practicing Christmas songs. (Hearing them through closed doors increases the feeling of anticipation, but we make a practice of not singing carols until Christmas.)

In the kitchen in the daytime, the cooks are preparing what can be prepared ahead of the festive food for the twelve days of Christmas, and in the evening men and women, staff, guests, and applicants, are baking, baking, baking cookies and desserts from all over the world.

The handicraft department is preparing the decorations for the insides of our buildings, and the men are dealing with the decorations God has given us outside: snow, snow, and more snow. It is oh-so-beautiful, but it requires work, and they are shoveling it, plowing it, snow-blowing it, and pulling it off the roofs.

The guests are having weekly liturgy classes—this year led by Julie Coxe, Fr. Kieran Kilcommons, and Charlie Cavanaugh—and they are doing a lot of the work of putting on the feasts.

On December 6th, they put on a humorous skit about the life of St. Nicholas, and we were given gingerbread bishop cookies and the name of someone in the community for whom to pray for the coming year.

On December 8th, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, like the people of the Middle Ages, we had a day off work, an extra Sunday as it were, a day of celebrating our Mother in the midst of this very busy time. Several guests made their Act of Consecration to Our Lady on that day.

On December 12th, we celebrated the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, a day in which we pour out our love for our Mother and celebrate our joy in being her children.

We began the day, as has become our custom in recent years, with mañanitas, morning songs that Mexican people sing to someone, on their birthday for example. People sang in their native tongues—English, French, Korean, Spanish, Hungarian, and Rumanian.

We had a regular workday, and at the festive evening Mass, we sang in Spanish. Then it was on to a Mexican supper.

In the evening we had a delightful sort of fiesta. It began with a simple dramatic presentation of the beautiful story of the apparition of Our Lady of Guadalupe, which was followed by the singing of the Hail Mary in three different languages. It ended with a laughter and fun-filled time of games, dancing, and a short humorous presentation.

Tomorrow, December 14th, we will celebrate a Madonna House feast, the anniversary of the death of our foundress Catherine Doherty. Every year, we take this as a day of recollection—a brief pause in a busy time to help us to center on the reality that the underlying basis of our life is not work or any other activity but God.

Of course, the rest of life goes on during Advent: the everyday work necessary to keep the community, as Fr. David put it so well in his article, "functioning and relatively peaceful."

Our ongoing education continues, the guests’, spiritual formation program and applicants’ classes, for example. Peter Gravelle gave the kitchen crew a class on sharpening knives, and Gretchen Schaefer, gave them one about food safety. In connection with Christmas decorations, the handicraft department offered a class on wheat weaving.

Mary Davis shared with a group what she had learned at a Peace and Development conference about Canadian mining interests in the developing world. The priests had a study day. Some of us saw a movie giving us some background on the crisis in Burma. Several staff went on directed retreats.

Lionel Pauzé, a friend who tunes our pianos, gave us a talk about his recent time in China where he has started a piano manufacturing business.

Ronnie MacDonell, while on holidays visiting his brother in Indiana, attended a conference on human trafficking and slavery. Larry Klein and Raandi King attended a two-day conference on euthanasia and physician assisted suicide, and they gave a talk sharing with us what they had learned.

Rae Stanley manned a booth at our local parish bazaar, where she sold some items from our gift shop. The proceeds went to the parish, which is in the midst of a drive to raise money for much-needed renovations for the church.

Our directors general made a visitation to Marian Centre, our house in Edmonton. The former bishop of our diocese, Archbishop Richard Smith, has recently been appointed bishop there, and he is grateful that we have a house in his new diocese.

Gee Hyun Park, one of our Korean guests, received the sacrament of confirmation at the Mass of Christ the King.

What a gift from God and from the Church is our tremendously rich liturgical cycle, one that corresponds both with the seasons of the year and seasons of our life with God! May we enter into these seasons as fully as we can, and may God open our hearts wide to receive the graces and blessings that flow from them.