Spirituality

OSV New/Bob Roller

Advent teaches us watchfulness

Friday, December 12, 2025Spirituality

Submit a Letter to the Editor

"What we must learn to do, we must do to learn," as Aristotle succinctly puts it.

In each of the synoptic Gospels, Our Lord tells his disciples -- including you and me -- to keep watch for his Second Coming. "Therefore, stay awake, for you know neither the day nor the hour," (Mt 25:13). "But of that day or hour, no one knows," (Mk. 13:32). "You also must be ready, because the Son of Man will come at an hour you do not expect.," (Lk. 12:40). If a virtue may be defined as a needed good trait of character, we can conclude that for a Christian a highly important virtue is watchfulness.
When we list what we look for in a Christian, then, besides kindness, thoughtfulness, and cheerfulness, among other virtues, we must place watchfulness.
But how does someone acquire a virtue? Some virtues can be acquired only as gifts, such as the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity. Intellectual virtues, on the other hand (say, skill in statistical inference), are acquired by focused study and doing problems. But any virtue that involves the heart, as watchfulness seems to be, must be acquired by the deliberate doing of the acts characteristic of that virtue. "What we must learn to do, we must do to learn," as Aristotle succinctly puts it.
People who want to change what they are like often make resolutions. To wit: "I resolve that each day, when I wake up, I will remember that the Lord will come again. I will voice a prayer to him, expressing my anticipation, such as Maranatha, 'Come, Lord!'"

The early Christians apparently did something like this. They had a one-word prayer for that purpose in Aramaic, "Maranatha!," "Come, Lord!" St. Paul ends an epistle with this prayer (1 Cor 16:22). St. John uses it in his Apocalypse (Rev. 22:20). And the early Christian document called the "Didache," or "Teaching of the Twelve Apostles," contains the following remarkable language:
"Remember, Lord, thy church to deliver it from all evil and to perfect it in thy love; and gather it together from the four winds -- yes, the church which has been sanctified -- into thy kingdom which thou hast prepared for it; for thine is the power and the glory for ever and ever. May grace come and may this world pass away. Hosanna to the God of David. If any man is holy, let him come; if any man is not, let him repent. Maranatha. Amen." (10:8-14).
However, the church in its wisdom and maturity has settled upon a different approach. It has set aside a season, at the beginning of its year, which through its hymns, prayers, symbols, and traditions, leads us day after day, hour after hour, repeatedly to look to the Lord's coming. This is the season of Advent. And just as all good teachers lead their students to some difficult result by putting before them something attractive and pleasant, so the church leads us to look for the Second Coming by putting before us, in this season, the genial loveliness of Christmas.
In anticipating Christmas, we anticipate the Second Coming. Christmas seems designed for that purpose. Just about everything in Christmas mirrors something about John the Baptist, and something about the Last Judgment. The voice of angels resounding from the heavens: the voice of the Baptist, and the sounding of a trumpet blast at the end of time. A star guiding the Magi: "the dawn from on high (which) shall break upon us" (Lk. 1:78), and "the stars will fall from the sky" when he comes again (Mt. 24:29). Herod and all of Jerusalem are in a tumult. (Matt. 2:3) Another Herod took offense at John, and at the Second Coming "all the tribes of the earth will mourn." (Matt. 24:30).
Christmas is not, after all, the anniversary of the Incarnation: the Annunciation is that. With the Epiphany, it marks more properly the coming into the world of the savior. And yet his work is done, and we are definitively saved, only after judgment -- after a particular judgement which confronts us after death, and in a general judgement, when all of us rise again: "The New Testament speaks of judgment primarily in its aspect of the final encounter with Christ in his second coming, but also repeatedly affirms that each will be rewarded immediately after death in accordance with his works and faith." (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1021)
This combination in Advent, of the geniality of Christmas with a bracing and holy apprehension over the Second Coming, is captured in many of the old Advent hymns, such as "Vox clara ecce intonat." "From above a Lamb is sent, freely to pardon our debt," but "When a second time he flashes forth, and terror encircles the globe, may he not have come to punish us for our crimes" as we had already "implored his mercy with tears."
The Creed seems to evince the watchfulness we are speaking about. Instead of saying, "I believe in" a judgment and a resurrection, it says, "I expect it." That is, I anticipate, await, and watch for it.
Children often ask at Christmas, why cannot the spirit of Christmas inform how people act throughout the whole year? But year by year, increasingly, it should for a Christian, in ever more evident good cheer and good will. And so also the spirit of Advent: in that mysterious combination of apprehension and glad expectation which is Christian watchfulness.

You may follow him on Substack at MichaelJosephPakaluk.Substack.com.

- Michael Pakaluk, an Aristotle scholar and Ordinarius of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas, is a professor in the Busch School of Business at the Catholic University of America. He lives in Hyattsville, MD, with his wife Catherine, also a professor at the Busch School, and their eight children. His latest book is "Be Good Bankers: The Economic Interpretation of Matthew's Gospel."