Week 1 of Advent: Communion is not shampooing your hair.

I love Advent. I always have. I’ve always enjoyed the wreath my church displays, the nativity scene my church prepares, and my favorite color as a child was purple, so that helped. As I’ve grown in my faith, particularly in college, I’ve started to appreciate Advent for different reasons. While Advent, like Lent, is a time of preparation, there’s a different kind of excitement involved that’s difficult for me to put into words. When we prepare for Easter during the Lenten season, Jesus has been living and working for years as a grown man; He has his apostles and many disciples; He has been preaching for a long time; we know what He is capable of (to a point… I mean, will we ever fully understand His mercy? Probably not.). But as we prepare for Christmas during Advent, we are preparing for the birth of a beautiful baby boy, a baby very much like the babies we have in our lives--we could have held him, fed him, cuddled with him, sung him to sleep, and cared for him like any other baby. Can you see the difference in that excitement? It’s beautiful that we have the opportunity to celebrate His birth and His re-birth through the resurrection.

I’ve mentioned the word preparation a few times because it is essentially what Advent is--a time of preparation for the coming of our Lord. My priest gave a great homily this past Sunday about preparation, and I wanted to spend a little time reflecting on his words. He discussed different levels of preparation in our lives in regards to Christ’s coming (both the Nativity and the ultimate coming of the Lord), but one of his ideas stuck with me more than the rest.

We talk about preparing for the coming of Christ, but how do we prepare for Christ before we receive Him at every Mass? I’m definitely guilty of treating Holy Communion like a routine: sing along with the hymn, get up from my kneeler, take the Body, drink the Blood, return to my pew, sing a little more, pray. Does that not sound like lather, rinse, repeat? Receiving the Eucharist should not feel like shampooing my hair. As Catholics, we have the beautiful opportunity to receive Christ’s Body and Blood every single time we go to Mass, and we need to prepare ourselves for that occasion every single time. In order to do that, I’ve had to learn what I find distracting before Communion, you know, the whole “acknowledge the problem if you want to fix it” idea. Here are a few things I’ve noticed that I do (and I’m being completely honest):

Focusing too much on the hymn. I love to sing, and singing is praying twice (or so they say), but for me, I may need to stop singing to truly focus on Jesus when I go to receive Communion.
Looking around for attractive men my age. Don’t kid yourself--we’re all guilty of that. But seriously, those young men may be wonderful young men, but I need to be focusing on the best man in my life--Jesus Christ.
Creating to-do lists or other kinds of lists in my head. I may have a lot to do that afternoon, or maybe I don’t want to forget taco seasoning at the grocery store, but those things should come second to understanding the beauty of the body and blood of Christ.

What can we do to focus more on the Eucharist during Mass? How can we treat Holy Communion less like a routine? As we prepare ourselves for Christmas, I pray that we can use the next four weeks, the next 25 days, to truly focus on Christ and ask God how He is calling us to prepare for Jesus’ coming.