Christmas should be an attitude toward life, not an endurance exercise. This Advent season, why not shop the scriptures rather than the malls to prepare?

THANKSGIVING, AND IN SOME PLACES HALLOWEEN, is barely over these days before stores begin to play Christmas songs as background sound for the orgy of buying and wrapping and overspending. The pumpkins and scarecrows and cornucopia of October and November get put hastily aside to make way for cheap tinsel and cute music and flashing lights.

The signal is clear: There is no time to sink into the quiet of fall that is promised with the coming of Thanksgiving. By the Friday morning that follows it, the raucousness of capitalist Christmas bursts suddenly upon us. The warnings of autumn, with its browning of leaves and graying of skies, that life, too, is susceptible to the wisdom of the seasons gets lost in the plastic world of limitless desire and limited resources. Shopping becomes what Advent is meant to be: the consuming preparation for one of the greatest feasts of the Christian year.

But commercialism is not the problem. We're a consumer society whatever the season. The problem is that the lack of contemplative consideration that comes with Christmas consumerism too often drowns out the sounds of Advent and drains not only the feast but even, perhaps, the rest of the year of its meaning.

As a result, we have managed to make Christmas an event, a passing fancy, an exhausting endurance exercise, stripped of reflection by the pressure of social protocols. But judging from the scripture of the season, Christmas is surely meant to be an attitude toward life, not a carnival. It is meant to be arrived at slowly and lived succulently. Christmas is not meant to be simply a day of celebration; it is meant to be a month of contemplation. But because Advent has been lost somewhere between the Thanksgiving turkey and the pre-Christmas sales, we have lost one of the richest seasons of the year. Unless we can reclaim Advent, the lack of it will show dearly in the way we go through the rest of life itself.

Advent is an excursion through scripture meant to give depth and emotional stability to the days for which there are no songs, no tinsel, no flashing lights to distract us from its raw, tart marrow. Advent grounds us in the assumptions, crowned by memory of Christmas, that give us strength for all the dull times of the rest of the year.

First Week of Advent: Hope
Jeremiah 33:14-The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah.

Luke 21:26-27-"People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken. Then they will see 'the Son of Man coming in a cloud' with power and great glory."

Life, Jeremiah proposes in the first week of Advent, is a promise. But the fulfillment of the promise, Luke points out, is not always apparent. On those two visions rests the virtue of hope that Christmas is meant to signal.

Hope is a thin and slippery thing, sorely tested and hard to come by in this culture. We have been bombed and wounded, frightened and enmeshed in things not of our own choosing, not even of our understanding. There is an enemy out there whom we cannot see and do not know.

More than that, we have seen the social fabric of the country rent, not only by others but even at our own hands: We have sold violence and produced violence and defended violence for years. We have cut back on social programs and increased our military spending on Neanderthal weaponry that wounds the national infrastructure and gives little or no security. We have substituted power for hope and found ourselves powerless. We feel hopeless.

But hope is not for easy times, the first week of Advent says. Hope comes only when hope is gone, when we are "fainting from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon" our worlds. Then hope and only hope reigns supreme. Then we see the works of a God who sends compassion through strangers and support through bureaucratic systems. Then we go color blind where people are concerned and see Jesus where Jesus has always been-in the eyes of the other who waits to see that same Jesus in our own.

Hope is not insane optimism in the face of palpable evil or dire circumstances. It is not the shallow attempt of well-meaning but facile friends to "cheer us up" in bad times. It's not the irritating effort of ill-at-ease counselors who work to make us "reframe" our difficulties so that everyone around us will not have to deal with them, too. No, hope is not made of denial. Hope is made of memories.

Hope reminds us that there is nothing in life we have not faced that we did not, through God's gifts and graces-however unrecognized at the time-survive. Hope is the recall of good in the past, on which we base our expectation of good in the future, however bad the present. It digs in the rubble of the heart for memory of God's promise to bring good out of evil and joy out of sadness and, on the basis of those memories of the past, takes new hope for the future. Even in the face of death. Even in the fear of loss. Even when our own private little worlds go to dust, as sooner or later, at length or at least a little, they always do. Or as Czech president Václav Havel put it: "Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out."

The first week of Advent calls us to hope in the promise that God is calling us to greater things and will be with us as we live them.