Last week, the Opening Prayer for the First Sunday of Advent told us to “run forth to meet Your Christ with righteous deeds!” Our focus should be on running forth “to meet Your Christ” — not expressing interest, not thinking about it, not even strolling over, but running forth — doing the spiritual 100-meter dash that is Advent. The exhortation in the Collect for the First Sunday of Advent since at least the 600s has told the faithful that this is what Advent is all about.

The Opening Prayer for the Second Sunday of Advent likewise offers sage advice, particularly for our times. The prayer asks for God’s grace that “no earthly undertaking hinder those who set out in haste to meet your Son, but may our learning of heavenly wisdom gain us admittance to His company.” There are at least two vital points in that prayer.

We ask God that “no earthly undertaking hinder those who set out in haste to meet your Son.” Note the connection to last week: Christians should not be “hinder[ed]” as they “set out in haste.” You must “run forth” to be in haste. Time is fleeting; there are just over two weeks until Christmas. Get moving!

Alas, however, that warning and that appeal usually generate a response like “what presents do I still have to buy?” “What do I have to do yet?” “Have I sent out my cards?” “What do I get X?” All those “to do” things get jammed into these two-plus weeks before Christmas.

The Collect asks God to refocus our attention: let “no earthly undertaking hinder those who set out to meet your Son.” In other words, is your to-do list being governed by readying yourself and your loved ones “to meet [God’s] Son?” Is that perspective controlling? Or are more ephemeral, more transitory, more passing matters eating up the precious time in your Advent sprint? If they are, are you ready to ask God for the grace to refocus and reprioritize, to surmount those worldly obstacles?

Why bother? Because, as the Collect goes on, in disengaging from such temporal and transient matters we learn “heavenly wisdom.” Remember what wisdom is according to the Bible. It is not “book learning,” not “education,” as we today measure it. Wisdom is knowing how to live properly, and, for Jews as well as for Christians, knowing “how to live properly” means knowing how to live in right relationship with God. Because if that relationship is warped, so is the rest of man’s life. That life can hardly be called “successful.” So, in disengaging from the multiple evanescent claims on our Advent time that impede our “setting out in haste” to meet Christ, we actually learn wisdom because we learn what matters.

And in learning wisdom about what matters in our lives, we actually ready ourselves for an encounter with Christ, who is “the power of God and the wisdom of God” (I Cor 1:24). Some today deny Jesus’ Divinity, willing only to hold Him forth as an “enlightened teacher” behind the “joy” of the “holiday season,” while others deny Him outright, making December 25 the holiday that dare not speak its name. They are in some ways the contemporary embodiments of the two camps about whom St. Paul spoke in that passage, when He identified God’s Wisdom in Christ as being to some “foolishness” and “a stumbling block” (1 Cor 1:23). In learning wisdom we reject being caught up in modernity’s holiday “sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Let us also not succumb in Advent to practical atheism. In teaching about atheism, Vatican II spent some time discussing theoretical atheism as a philosophy. But it also identified a phenomenon it called “practical atheism,” referring to Christians who are only nominally Christian, i.e., who glory (or trade) in the name “Christian” but whose practical lives reflect anything but. Vatican II warned against this phenomenon, noting such nominal Christians bear responsibility for driving people away from the faith.

“Modern civilization itself often complicates the approach to God not for any essential reason but because it is so heavily engrossed in earthly affairs” (Gaudium et spes, #19). Yes, that often happens in the “holiday season,” perhaps not always with malice aforethought, but the practical effect remains that Christ gets lost in the runup to Christmas. Catholics, therefore, have the responsibility to be not just passive but active, not just talking about “the reason for the season” but practically incarnating it in their pre-Christmas lives and priorities. And, in most Western societies, you can gauge someone’s priorities by looking at their schedules, by how they prioritize time.

It’s fitting this week coincides with the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, because it’s appropriate our guide on the way to Wisdom is Mary. Sunday’s Opening Prayer prayed that we have “set out in haste” towards Christmas. After receiving God’s invitation to be the Mother of Jesus (during which she also was informed about her relative Elizabeth’s pregnancy), the Gospel immediately tells us Mary “set out in haste for the hill country of Judea” (Lk 1:39). Mary’s receiving the Son of God in her womb did not result in complacency; instead, she also “set out in haste” to bring Jesus to others, not just in the form of useful assistance but in the very physical presence of Him who caused John to leap (see here for more) and Elizabeth to proclaim “blessed is the fruit of your womb” (Lk 1:41-42). Yes, the Immaculate Conception is about Mary’s being conceived without sin in the womb of Anna, not Jesus’ conception. But Mary (along with John the Baptist) are our Advent guides. Mary keeps herself focused on the essentials while also getting involved in the passing but necessary, e.g., getting a home ready for a new baby. We can learn a lot about wisdom from she whose titles include “Seat of Wisdom.”

Finally, we are setting forth in haste with heavenly wisdom to “gain admittance to His company.” Yes, we commemorate Jesus’ First Coming in Bethlehem, but Advent still remains focused on His Second Coming. Our “spiritual race” (2 Tm 4:7) is not yet over. We are still “working out our salvation” (Phil 2:12) amidst a struggle that predated the First Coming and will extend until the Second, a “struggle… not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers… the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms (Eph 6:12). Amidst the “fa-la-la-la-la” of Christmas, we should not forget why Christ became man and ensure we have not made that coming in vain, even as we celebrate it.