With Mary, Looking on the Face of Christ

Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God

Vigil Mass, 31 December 2008

Numbers 6:22-27

Galatians 4:4-7

Luke 2:16-21

 

            The Octave Day of Christmas, this special feast in honor of Mary, Jesus’ Mother, celebrated eight days after His birth, on the day He received His Name and was bound to the Covenant through circumcision, this day which in modern times has been celebrated by the Catholic Church as the World Day of Prayer for Peace, finds us once again teeter-tottering on the brink of a New Year, 2009. As believing people we gather tonight to sing “Thank you, God!” for all that has been in 2008 and “Please, God!” make 2009 even better! Our lives and our world are indeed in His Hands.

            The Holy Father closes his message for tomorrow’s World Day of Prayer for Peace with these beautiful words addressed to people everywhere, Catholic and non alike: “At the start of the New Year, then, I extend to every disciple of Christ and to every person of good will a warm invitation to expand their hearts to meet the needs of the poor and to take whatever practical steps are possible in order to help them. The truth of the axiom cannot be refuted: ‘to fight poverty is to build peace.’”

            Earlier in his message, Pope Benedict mentions a series of points that have to be addressed in fighting poverty. Among them is child poverty, which is, I think, an appropriate topic to address on the Octave of Jesus’ birth. The Holy Father writes: “When the family is weakened, it is inevitably children who suffer. If the dignity of women and mothers is not protected, it is the children who are affected most.” What to do? Besides finding ways to serve the most vulnerable in our midst, maybe we need to remind ourselves once again of who we are, where we come from, and what is most important in our lives as Catholics.

Poor Mary and Joseph, Joseph especially, must have been aghast, almost desperate, at having to bring Jesus into this world in a stable. Jesus came to us as the poorest of the poor. Lots of Nativity art work shows poor Joseph sitting there, holding his head, struggling to figure this all out: the mystery of God come to birth as a man and here in this humble stable. And yet… the stable at Bethlehem was a point of light which drew the visit that night of the shepherds alerted to this blessed event by the angel of the Lord. We heard about it this evening in Luke’s Gospel: “As for Mary, she treasured all these things and pondered them in her heart. And the shepherds went back glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen; it was exactly as they had been told.”

            Why did God, in the fullness of time – at the high point in His work of salvation, why did He expose His Only Begotten Son to dire poverty? How do we make sense of the challenge all of this must have represented to the Mother of our Lord? Why was Jesus born in a stable? Well, simply explained, knowing us as He does God could settle for no less than this high price. God’s sacrifice to restore mankind to Himself and God to mankind was total: the Father did not spare His only Son, but delivered Him up for the sake of all of us. It was a true sacrifice – from end to end: from the cradle to the grave, as they say, and of course in victory beyond the grave for Jesus and for us in the glory of the Resurrection.

            I saw an advertisement on TV for a new reality show, which is supposed to be starting in the New Year (no doubt to replace some show which flopped in the first part of the television season). My bet is that this new one will flop too; at least you’ll never find me watching it. At any rate, it’s another one of those TV programs where the contestants compete for weeks on end to become somebody’s best friend and thereby share his life of liming and carefree partying. I’m sorry, but why would anyone want to do that? It’s just too little to get excited about! Moreover, it all seems terribly unreal and leads me to believe that my dictionary must be out of date, because in mine I can’t find a definition for this grand old word “reality” to fit this sort of folly. Even if I bought a new dictionary that provided a new definition of “reality”, I’m sorry, I wouldn’t accept what the movie and television industry is trying to sell me. It’s simply wrong and way too shallow to waste one’s time on. Ultimately, if that were the only tradeoff for poverty, I would think you would be better off poor and in a stable.

Channel-surf all you want and Google-search until you drop, my bet is that you will never find anything bigger or better than what “Mary… treasured … and pondered … in her heart”: life with Jesus, True God and True Man. Not only was her life reality, but the Blessed Mother looked God in the face at Bethlehem, held Him in her arms, fed Him, kissed Him and tucked Him in to sleep when His tiny eyelids got heavy; she watched Him grow; she pondered the mystery of her Son for thirty years and more.

            Recently, I read one of those silly little filler stories newspapers buy to make copy. It was about some movie star who insisted on doing himself a bungee-jump in an upcoming film, instead of leaving it to the stuntman. He classified the experience as “one-time” and “life-changing”. The only drawback, he said, was that now he’s having recurring nightmares about dying. Bungee-jumping the ultimate? Guess again! No matter how intense and exciting the here and now may be, to set your heart on this side of the grave (eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die) is too little for a full life. “In death”, as the preface for the funeral Mass goes, “life is changed, not ended”.

On her feast, let us look to Mary and the love with which she bore and brought to birth the Promised One. In the course of Jesus’ relatively short but intense lifetime, Mary shared first His little joys, and later His great sufferings and His victory. We need only look to Mary and understand that in her the Church is prefigured in all its glory, as are we the various parts of that great body. Mary participates in God’s work of reconciling the world to Himself through His Son and we can too, born again through water and the Holy Spirit, if we so choose and as Saint Paul says, make up in our lives through personal sacrifice for what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ for the salvation of the world. It does not get any better. That is reality, far more than an unforgettable bungee-jump or an everlasting lime. Would that we were eager above all else to live as Mary did! Poor, yes, but not spiritually impoverished!

            The newspapers and the yearend reports of radio and TV ask despairingly again and again about the whereabouts of peace: too many killings, too much violence! … Why despair? Granted, the battle for peace will not be absolutely won until the end of time. Meantime, if we make life easier for mothers and their babies, if we give children a chance to grow healthy, strong and loved, if we give a joyful answer to all who ask about our concern for the needs of the less fortunate and thereby better illustrate the reason for our hope in everlasting life, we might be able to help others to wonder at those things which Mary pondered with such profit in her heart.

            Strive in 2009 not only to be worthy of your inheritance, as St. Paul would say, heirs in God and heirs with Christ, but strive to be eager to receive the blessing, the only blessing which is really real (far beyond a constant search for entertainment, beyond health, good looks and money), receive the blessing which God instructed Moses to teach to his brother Aaron, the high priest, and which Mary in her life knew in its fullness: “May the Lord uncover his face to you and bring you peace”. Strive in 2009, as Mary did in her day, to ponder the mystery of the Incarnation (God become Man) and through your understanding and faith help to bring Christ to a waiting world.

            The Blessed Virgin Mary had a life in this world worth more than many a Magnificat and now she sits with her Son on His Throne in glory. Material poverty and disadvantage in this world must be fought, fought with a loving and expanded heart.

Who is poor, really? Poor indeed is the child who does not know the stable at Bethlehem and its Light. Poor indeed is the person of any age who thinks reality lies elsewhere but in the manger.

 

Eyes Fixed on the Lord

Third Sunday of Lent
24 February 2008

Oculi mei semper ad Dominum, quia ipse evellet de laqueo pedes meos. Respice in me et miserere mei, quoniam unicus et pauper sum ego. (Psalm 24: 15-16)

My eyes are ever fixed on the Lord, for he releases my feet from the snare. O look at me and be merciful, for I am wretched and alone.

Opening Prayer

Father, you have taught us to overcome our sins by prayer, fasting, and works of mercy. When we are discouraged by our weakness, give us confidence in your love.

With a powerful Gospel like that of the encounter at the well between Jesus and the Samaritan Woman and the discourse about living water, it hardly seems appropriate to offer a reflection on anything else this Sunday, but I find myself drawn to the Opening Antiphon and Prayer of today's Mass.

I guess I'm looking for a word of challenge and encouragement for the “hardened sinner”: “hardened”-big or “hardened”-small, mortal/grave or venial/faults and failings type of sinner. What do I say to myself and to others as preacher to turn on that light, to open that door, to point out that “path less taken”. Which way leads to Lenten conversion? I think that our antiphon from Psalm 24 can be a great deal of help or at least it can offer us another approach than those we may have tried to date in achieving our goal through prayer, fasting and works of mercy without ending up back again at square one.

To say “My eyes are ever fixed on the Lord” is to say something powerful and big. Truth to be told, not many of us can say it: we are people of wandering eyes and therefore of wandering thoughts. The distractions are partly imposed upon us by our world: TV, sound systems, cellphones, the Web... Even people of modest means have many more things which crowd them than in the past. Our world everywhere is noisier and hence more distracting than once upon a time. What to do?

Perhaps the effort is futile. Should we be that focused in life? What would being that focused look like? Would it leave us time to earn a living, to live our lives, to smell the flowers, as they say?

Lenten sacrifices are meant to have to do with giving up vices, yes, but also and especially offering up good things for the benefit of the discipline as well as the symbolic value, the significance of the sacrifice involved. On the other hand, even when it comes to repentance from our sins and our firm resolve to sin no more, it's kind of like the old country western song's refrain: “Temptation, get away from me... but not too far!” That our life is with the Lord, we know. Rarely, however, do we encounter people like St. Paul who are torn between this world and the next. The here and now, sometimes even the sinful one, seems to have the edge over our longing for heaven.

As we said in the opening pray, we are discouraged by our weakness, by the way we give in to distractions. We seek a confidence in the love of the Lord, which will free us from anxiety. Having been freed from the snare by forgiveness, we are often faced with Jesus' admonition not to have cleaned and swept the house for the devil to return with seven spirits worse than himself, thus leaving us in a worse state than we were in before our Lenten penance.

The message would be that we really are fooling ourselves if we cannot identify with the psalmist: “O look at me and be merciful, for I am wretched and alone”. The good is not to be found in setting our hearts on the here and now. Where in this world can I look for my good? Which other person, what other thing is going to carry me? Not only is Godless-living a folly, but a “time-share” relationship (Sunday, Lord, for You and the rest for me) doesn't work either. St. Peter: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of everlasting life.”

Everybody should take the habit then, right? Not quite! Another way of approaching the matter is in trying to understand what is meant by the command to “pray constantly”. “My eyes are ever fixed on the Lord” is really a figure for the same thing. Another way of saying it is to say that we need to live in the Lord's presence at all times, not as if we were under surveillance but as if we were being held or accompanied by Him.

I recently had a visit from a woman of retirement age, born here in Trinidad, but who had spent all her adult life up north. With time on her hands over Christmas, my friend reflected with me on what distinguishes Trinidad today from the Trinidad of her childhood and youth. Permit me to share one little insight, which I have since tested with other ordinary folk and have found to be frighteningly accurate. These are not her words, they are mine. “Mommies are no longer sanctifying the home with prayer and song as they did almost universally 50 and more years ago.” I repeat, those are my words; what she told me and what every adult in Trinidad whom I have asked about this has confirmed, goes this way: namely, that back when they were children, while mother was at home all week doing her chores, she would hum or sing the hymns from Sunday Mass.

When I mentioned this to one man, he looked at me as if a light had gone on in his head, as it dawned on him for the very first time why he could sing all the hymns from heart, by heart, as a child. Mommy provided the joyful noise which was a direct link with God and a window on the Gospel. Granted, I would be the last one to suggest that we try and turn back the clock. Even so, one must ask, how was it that such a good part of society lived in the presence of God, while cleaning up the house, hanging out the clothes, washing the dishes or changing and bathing the baby? Have we lost that grace forever? How can we recover it? What would be the equivalent in our day and time and how do we attain that atmosphere for ourselves and generations to come?

Maybe it would be enough, rather than trying to answer objections like “I can't sing”, my job doesn't allow of humming and such, just simply to say, beyond your Lenten resolutions... Seek the Lord! Keep an eye on the One who has forgiven you, on the One who grants you salvation, life and joy without end. We can be frightfully anxious and depressed, if we focus on the limited. The limitless is so much better and so much more beautiful.

My eyes are ever fixed on the Lord, for he releases my feet from the snare. O look at me and be merciful, for I am wretched and alone.

Father, you have taught us to overcome our sins by prayer, fasting, and works of mercy. When we are discouraged by our weakness, give us confidence in your love.

Amen. Amen.

Let the Child in!

Mass for Christmas during the Night
2007 - Rosary Monastery - St. Ann’s
Port of Spain, Trinidad


Isaiah 9:1-6
Titus 2:11-14
Luke 2:1-14


“’And here is a sign for you: you will find a baby wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger’. And suddenly with the angel there was a great throng of the heavenly host, praising God and singing: ‘Glory to God in the highest heaven, and peace…’”

I don’t know about you but I’ve always felt sort of left out when people start speaking about their conversion experiences. As long as it was just televangelists or non-Catholic types knocking on your door of a Saturday, bragging about the date and time their lives had changed having accepted Jesus, it was something I guess one could write off as a bit unbalanced and maybe even untrue. Truth to be told, even Catholic charismatic conversions never worried me much. But if none of that seems right doesn’t there still have to be something that we’ll simply call “growth in holiness”, change, betterment, or progress even in the life of a rank and file Catholic Christian? Shouldn’t the word “conversion” have a meaning for me too? Of course it should!

We’ve just finished a preparatory season in purple: Advent. Where do we find ourselves tonight? Has Advent helped us prepare for Christmas? Are our hearts more open to the Lord who comes? Do we live our lives watching and waiting for the Lord? Is He my hope and my salvation? This is a very tough kind of examination of conscience to make, because it’s not as concrete as pinpointing sins of thought, word or deed, action or omission. In fact, I’d probably say it may even be unwise to try and measure our growth in the spiritual life that way if you, like me, can’t really point to some earthshaking conversion experience like being knocked off your high horse as St. Paul was on the way to Damascus. How does an average Catholic check himself or herself to see how things are going (remembering, please, that we’ve always been taught, and rightly so, to mistrust emotion or sentiment as the measure of our closeness to God)? We cannot, however, excuse ourselves from this type of examination of conscience, this kind of check on our devotion, on how or whether we are living for the Lord. The powerful readings of this Mass in the Night for Christmas are evidence enough that the Light, Who is Christ, shines in and changes the hearts of all the people. What difference does my baptism make in my life?

As I say, this is not an easy check. When all else fails, we can look to the lives of the saints to find a mirror, a solid point of reference for measuring how we are doing in our own lives. Thanks be to God there are lots of saints from every day and time and nearly all walks of life! If you look hard enough there has to be some saint you can identify with or who can be a model and a challenge to help you on your own path to holiness. Now maybe my early life wasn’t that of a “child-star-saint” like St. Catherine of Siena or the Little Flower, like young Aloysius Gonzaga or Dominic Savio. I certainly was not a bad boy, but in all honesty it would be hard to point to heroic goodness in those tender years of my life. Besides, they all died young and holy – I must keep looking. Let us get on to grown up saints and repentant sinners, like St. Paul or St. Peter, like St. Mary Magdalene, or if we dare mention him in a Dominican house, like St. Ignatius Loyola! If a lightning conversion hasn’t taken place, what has happened in my life? Do I belong (like I should) to God with all my heart, all my soul and strength, regardless of my age and state in life?

“The people that walked in darkness has seen a great light; on those who live in a land of deep shadow a light has shone… For there is a child born for us, a son given to us and dominion is laid on his shoulders; and this is the name they give him: Wonder-Counselor, Mighty-God, Eternal-Father, Prince-of-Peace”.

Isaiah’s prophecy simply speaks of hope and of powerful, earthshaking change. Once the child is born, once the son is given, nothing can be the same. How indeed has the Birth at Bethlehem, the Sermon on the Mount, the Last Supper, and Judgment before Pilate, the trudge up to Calvary… how has the Glory of Easter changed me?

I don’t know if my mother could pinpoint the date during my adolescence or preadolescence – I surely couldn’t tell you when – but I can remember very clearly awakening one evening after supper to the realization that my parents loved me very much and I hadn’t really shown them my love or appreciation in return. Having to do something and not knowing what (remember an adolescent), I walked out into the kitchen and washed the dishes. My suspicion is that something similar happens when we give ourselves to God, when we finally recognize how much He loves us and how little we have done in return. But how in my life of faith do I walk out into the kitchen to do the dishes for Jesus when the truth of who he is for the world dawns on me?

St. Paul tells Titus and he tells us: “God’s grace has been revealed, and it has made salvation possible for the whole human race and taught us that what we have to do is to give up everything that does not lead to God, and all our worldly ambitions; we must be self-restrained and live good and religious lives here in this present world, while we are waiting in hope for the blessing which will come with the Appearing of the glory of our great God and savior Christ Jesus. He sacrificed himself for us in order to set us free from all wickedness and to purify a people so that it could be his very own…”

“…we must be self-restrained and live good and religious lives here in this present world, while we are waiting in hope for the blessing which will come…”

Among the voluntary sacrifices we used to suggest to children as a way of bringing joy to their parents and sharing in the sufferings of Christ was going out to the kitchen and doing the dishes without being asked. At the very end of the popular novel, “The Lord of the Rings”, after all the incredible scenes which were painted, the little heroes of the epic story are faced back home with perhaps the biggest challenge of all three volumes of the book, namely together to stand up and say “no” to evil, reclaiming their homes and their land from a wicked group of bullies. They win that victory too and it is perhaps their greatest. Real conversion in the life of a follower of Christ is something like that – it’s not flashy, it’s a roll up your sleeves and get-to-work kind of thing.

The birth of the savior, Christ the Lord, is heralded to the least, to the shepherds, by an angel who gave them the great sign of a bundled up, baby boy, lying in a manger. We’re not talking about show time or ecstasy. Handel’s Alleluia Chorus is not the interpretive key for Christmas but rather the hymn “Silent Night” is.

Come to Bethlehem! Come with all your heart and soul! I am sure Mary will let you hold the baby. Rejoice! Rejoice in hope! The Wonder-Counselor, Mighty-God, Eternal-Father, Prince-of-Peace” is here in our midst. Ultimately salvation is accomplished as our hearts open and we let the Child in, not as we slay the dragon, so to speak, but rather as we walk out to the kitchen to do the dishes without being asked.

Maybe this is all too much of a parable. But too many pious folk fool themselves into believing that they are the righteous and that the crown is theirs, as they sit comfortably with the innkeeper while the Child remains outdoors in the stable. Open your hearts to Christmas! Follow the angel’s invitation to go to the stable in Bethlehem! Leave lots of things aside for the sake of recognizing the son of David, born for us and for us given!

Between Christmas and Boxing Day a lot of food is prepared and here in this country many family rituals are replayed and a lot of socializing is done. It’s a favorite time of year for some and a source of almost desperate anxiety for others. Don’t, no matter how your spend these days, don’t mistake the true meaning of Christmas: it’s above all a time to give ourselves to God, a time when we can finally recognize how much He loves us and how little we have done in return. Keep the angels, the shepherds, the starkness of Bethlehem and its stable, keep the helpless baby boy, who is our savior, always before your mind’s eye. Let Christmas be the date and time of your conversion! Live your life in profound gratitude, wonder and awe! Respond to the love of the Christ Child; react like the shepherds or simply do the dishes without being asked!

In Spirit and in Truth

Easter Sunday
8 April 2007, Rosary Monastery
St. Ann’s, Port of Spain

Homily


“Till this moment they had failed to understand the teaching of scripture, that he must rise from the dead.”

If only there were more people in the world like Cornelius! Here’s a Roman citizen, a pagan, who with his family becomes convinced of the God of Israel, starts praying faithfully, opens his heart and life to the promptings of the Holy Spirit and is rewarded by our loving God, who let him become the first Gentile to hear the good news of the Resurrection and receive baptism from Peter himself.
As I say, if only more people, baptized or not, were like Cornelius! He put his life and the life of his whole household in God’s hands and was richly rewarded in hearing about and receiving God Himself in His Fullness, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, as Gift into his life and the lives of his loved ones.
The women came running frantically this Sunday morning to tell Peter that they had found the stone rolled back and the tomb empty. Peter and John set off at a dead run to see for themselves. The Gospel of John says that the disciple Jesus loved went into the tomb, he saw and he believed. Peter tells Cornelius’ household:
“…three days afterwards God raised him to life and allowed him to be seen, not by the whole people but only by certain witnesses God had chosen beforehand. Now we are those witnesses – we have eaten and drunk with him after his resurrection from the dead – and he has ordered us to proclaim this to his people and to tell them that God has appointed him to judge everyone, alive or dead. It is to him that all the prophets bear this witness: that all who believe in Jesus will have their sins forgiven through his name.”
All of us here present this morning really have a double calling, or should I say, we can find ourselves both in Peter and in Cornelius. The angel who appeared to Cornelius told him to send for Peter in Jaffa. The angel did not announce the Resurrection; Peter, the witness, did. Ours is not a mystic, crystal revelation from the Age of Aquarius or from any other new age’s crystal ball, but the gift of another person to us. Mommies and Daddies bring their little Cornelius’ and Cornelias to baptism and share their prayer life and faith with them. What happened in Caesarea to the household of Cornelius happens in every Christian home.
Now that’s the way it should be, but it could be that we didn’t grow up in a Christian home or we didn’t appreciate what we had at home or maybe didn’t have the kind of a witness we needed at home. Maybe Mommy and Daddy weren’t Sunday church people, who ate and drank, so to speak, with the Risen Lord. As we know, it’s never too late and many a Cornelius or Cornelia finds his or her way to the Risen Christ as an older child, as an adolescent or even as an adult. The key is a hunger and thirst for truth, light and life, along with a readiness to be taught by God in the person of the witness He sends to us. That witness may be a grandparent, may be a teacher at school, may be a relative our own age, may be a schoolmate, may be someone at work or even someone we meet by chance.
For all of us here the Cornelius side of our calling may already be history and the actuality would be our other vocation to be witnesses, to be people who hear the prompting of the angel’s voice like Peter on the rooftop in Jaffa at prayer and go looking for that Cornelius or Cornelia who is seeking God in truth. For most of us, that is something we’ll do not on the road but right at home, right at the office, in school or at play. We’ll do it by being people who have kept the flame of faith from Baptism alive in our hearts, people who if we have sinned or fallen from grace have come back to oneness with the Lord through the sacrament of penance and a true spirit of repentance. We’ll do our witnessing just as St. Paul urges us, that is simply, by never hesitating to answer should someone ask us the reason for our hope.
Our faith is neither esoteric nor does it require of us getting up on a soap box or shouting about on street corners. Our faith is living with God at home, giving Him that hour plus on Sunday, the first day of the week, never denying Him by the way we speak, act or dress. Marriages that are founded on love, grow in love and despite differences and misunderstandings endure and win in love are evident both to the rest of the family and to friends. Faith is the same: it’s not preachy it’s lived and loved.
Rejoice with me this Easter, all you Corneliuses and Cornelias out there! You are hearing the best of all good news: Resurrexit sicut dixit, Alleluia! He is risen as He said, Alleluia! Rejoice with me this Easter, all you Peters and Johns and Mary Magdalens and other Marys who were at the Tomb early this morning and found it empty! Rejoice in the Risen One! Alleluia!
Try, just try and find something to compare with this! Alleluia!

Be reconciled to God

Fourth Sunday of Lent – 18 March 2007


“So we are ambassadors for Christ; it is as though God were appealing through us, and the appeal that we make in Christ’s name is: be reconciled to God.”
(from II Reading: 2 Cor. 5: 17-21)

Jesus’ teaching in Luke’s Gospel Chapter 15, which centers around the powerful and beautiful story he told his listeners and which comes down to us through the Church is the one we popularly refer to as the parable of the prodigal son. The prodigal son is the younger son of two working on the farm with his father; he gets restless for some reason, demands his share of the inheritance, takes it and goes off to the big city and blows it all partying. Misery helps him come to his senses. He heads home with his confession all rehearsed: “Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Treat me as one of your hired hands.”
It’s a very happy story for the prodigal son and the way the story goes, we have to say with St. Paul that “it’s all God’s work”. As we learn from putting the three readings from this Sunday together, God, in Jesus, is the one who gives us the fruits of the Promised Land to eat; he prepares the banquet for us through no merit of our own, in fact just the opposite. Even though we have sinned against him, he takes away our shame, as Joshua said; he dresses us up in a festal garment, puts sandals on our feet and a ring on our finger! He doesn’t even let his son finish his confession of guilt. He was lost and now he is found; he was dead (to us anyway) and now he has come back to life.
It is a fabulous story and it is truly good news for us as well. What’s the special message for this Sunday then? I think it’s simply: Make your honest and complete confession of sin and then just enjoy the way God fusses over you! “…be reconciled to God.”
Whether we interpret Paul’s words to the Corinthians and to us using the words of the Psalm, “taste and see the goodness of the Lord,” or whether we tell and retell the story of the father’s unbounded love for even his prodigal son, the bottom line is the same: “I will rise and go to my father and tell him: Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you.” The father does the rest.
We never get happy or totally at home with confessing our sins, with admitting guilt, with taking the responsibility for something we’ve done or we’ve failed to do, causing something to go wrong. I guess that’s human nature, that’s human pride. Swallowing that pride and confessing our sins are a very grown-up, a very mature kind of thing. A good example of regular confession on the part of parents is what makes all the difference in a child’s first confession, as well as every confession after that first one. As a child, I don’t need to know what mommy and daddy confess to the priest in private, but watching them stand in line for confession and watching them kneel down to say their penance and say thank you to God after confession shows a child what he or she needs to do. Young people, especially adolescents, have an even rougher struggle with pride, just because they are still maturing. That’s the lesson of the prodigal son: he had to end up indenturing himself to somebody as a swineherd and nearly starving before he came around and put things in his life right. He ultimately did humble himself and return home, choosing to live in the right world, the good world created by his father.
How is this right world of the Church supposed to be? How is a good family supposed to be? Love and mutual respect within a family really are priceless. We can get by without a lot of creature comforts if we have each other in that good sort of way. The same is true of life in the Church: our Church “family” doesn’t have to be all that flashy. It is the spoiled child, really, who complains about things being boring. If somebody balks at going to church on Sunday, because it’s boring, I know I’m faced with a maturity issue. Parents and parish priests who anxiously try to make Sunday Mass an experience, to make church entertaining, are missing the point. Beauty in worship has its place, but pageantry and the spectacular are just for entertainment, part of that which the younger son ran off to the big city for, only to find out that the real stuff of life was what he’d left behind at home with his father.
This is the Fourth Sunday of Lent already. We’re only two weeks from Palm Sunday. Use these two weeks yet to see how things are going in your life. Has pride the upper hand in your life? When was your last good confession? Are family, church and school the center of your life? Can you distinguish between celebration and partying? Recognize your dignity and your worth! Learn the lesson the prodigal son had to learn the hard way and which the older son never did quite learn!
“So we are ambassadors for Christ; it is as though God were appealing through us, and the appeal that we make in Christ’s name is: be reconciled to God.”

The School of Nazareth

Holy Family Sunday is an important piece in the mosaic of the mystery not only of the Incarnation but also of our Salvation. The Scripture readings for this Sunday are rich especially in answers to the battery of questions concerning what Christmas has to say to me; what are the implications of the Christmas story, the infancy, the childhood, the boyhood of Jesus for me personally, for family life today, for life in the world?

One of my favorite "Holy Family Sunday things" is reading again the excerpt found in the breviary from Pope Paul VI's meditation offered in Nazareth in 1964, during the Holy Father's pilgrimage to the Holy Land. It has been an almost obligatory point of reference in the last now over four decades for reflections on the meaning and importance of Christian family life for the world, for the growth of children, for happiness. Pope Paul talks about the "school of Nazareth" and all the lessons a child, an adult, even a pope (who never stops learning) can draw from that school and briefly elaborates on what he means, mentioning three lessons concerning the importance of: 1) silence; 2) family life; 3) work.

Parents, children still at home who are big enough to play a role in family life, and all this world's mentors and teachers could profitably try to claim those three lessons for their own and for other families in our day and time.

My own thought today, however, circles around the words of the first preface for Christmas, which the celebrant at Mass may have chosen to sing or read today: "In the wonder of the incarnation your eternal Word has brought to the eyes of faith a new and radiant vision of your glory. In him we see our God made visible and so are caught up in love of the God we cannot see." In whom do we see our God made visible? In him, Baby Jesus! In him, that twelve year old with a purpose, "lost" in the Temple and "found" by his worried parents! In that boy, subject to his parents, learning an ordinary trade and learning the lessons of life!

Holy Family: not a holy card, not a pretty picture or an icon, but a family, that through youth, innocence, poverty, anguish and exile (Flight into Egypt), hard work, play, generous and self-sacrificing love puts the baby in our arms and lets us hold God and God's love. Verbum caro factum est - and his name is Jesus, born this holy night, yes, born. The Evangelists don't mention that Mary let the shepherds hold the new born in swaddling clothes, but Simeon took him in his arms in the Temple and exclaimed, "Now, O Lord, you can let your servant go in peace, because my eyes have seen...!" our God made visible.

We hold the Gospel Book high carrying it in procession, we enthrone that Book, we bow before it, we kiss it, we honor it with incense: why? Because it's not a story book but the words of life, given to us, which put us in touch not with fables but with the Truth, who is Christ, in whom we see our God made visible and are caught up in love. Holy Week and Easter shine from end to end, but Christmas' gentle light is not to be ignored: it's part of the picture.