Last week as I was driving home, I noticed that the city was placing Christmas wreaths on the light poles along Reynolds Street. It struck me that almost three weeks before Thanksgiving, we are already thinking about Christmas. What's more, we are overlooking the season of Advent, which precedes Christmas as the beginning of the church year.

Our post-modern world races from Halloween through Thanksgiving to Santa Claus without so much as a vague awareness of anything called Advent. Materialism, it seems, has skewed the focus of humanity.

The whole idea of Advent evolved through the Middle Ages. We think of medieval life only as one of ignorance, plagues, brutality and injustice. But such modern arrogance misses the fact that medieval life was organized around the idea of the centrality of God. Medieval life, if nothing else, was sacramental, and medieval human beings were familiar with a notion that they lived in two worlds, one material and one spiritual. Too many of our fellow Americans live in only the material one.

Medieval life built the tradition of Advent as a season for preparing for Christ's birth through penitence, just like Lent is a season for preparing for Christ's Passion through penitence. But I also think that Advent is a season to prepare for Christ's birth as the beginning of his story by reflecting on our own lives as stories. In other words, because of the story of Jesus, each of our own stories is different from what it would have been otherwise.

This might seem to be a simple task, reflecting on our own lives in the light of the story of Christ. But the truth is that we live so much on the outer surface of our lives that we lose touch with the places where our stories and Christ's story intersect.

Our accounting of historical time acknowledges that when the child was born, history itself fell in two parts: before him and after him. Similarly, when the story of our individual lives intersects with his story, our lives fall into two parts: before him and after him.

Much of Christianity, much of faithful living, depends on reflection. And the pace of post-modern life in the 21st century -- characterized by instant communication, information saturation, e-mail, iPhones and 24-hour news channels -- is not conducive to reflection. But if we can force ourselves to slow down long enough to view our lives, or rather what our lives might have been like without the story of Christ in them, I think that such moments of reflection are a form of penitence that fulfills the purpose of Advent.

Such moments of reflection, moreover, are a proper way to prepare ourselves, with gratitude, for the celebration of Christ's birth, which is the beginning of his story and of ours.