Author: DVO

Hosffman Ospino, writing in Give Us This Day, tells us that so much around us is designed to entice our senses. Meals are tested in labs to strike the perfect combination of flavors that will guarantee maximum pleasure. Aromas are designed to communicate precise messages. The right mixture of colors can cheer us up, increase our appetite, or predispose us to act in a particular way. The days of Christmas are, in many ways, a festival for the senses. It is impossible to ignore the colors, the aromas, the sounds, and the tastes associated with this time of the year. Intentionally or not, Christian or not, believer or not, we all are drawn into Christmas through the senses! Sensual stimulation is fascinating. Yet we must constantly remind ourselves that there is much more to Christmas than what we see, smell, taste, and touch. The celebration of the birth of Jesus is an invitation into the depths of God’s infinite mystery. In the manger, the child Jesus rests. His parents gaze in awe, as all parents do before their newborn. No dazzling colors, tasty meals, fancy aromas, or cheerful sounds—they are in a stable! What makes the scene so enthralling? A vulnerable child who has brought hope to the entire human race. The meaning of the event transcends the senses. God is among us. This is the child the prophetess Anna awaited. He is the one who, after two millennia, continues to captivate our hearts, minds, and even our senses.

“If God loves us no matter what we do, why keep the commandments? If we are not to be punished or rewarded for our efforts, then why make sacrifices?” Fr. Rolheiser writes that we don’t try to be good so that God loves and rewards us. God loves us no matter what we do, and heaven is never a reward for a good life. As Jesus assures us, God’s love is always both unmerited and unconditional; nothing we do can ever make God love us, just as nothing can stop God from loving us. God loves just as God does everything else – perfectly. God loves everything and everybody perfectly. Part of Christian dogma is that God’s love is what keeps everything in existence. If God stopped loving anything, it would cease to be. That raises an interesting question: If God loves everything and everyone perfectly, does God then also love Satan as much as he loves Jesus’ mother, Mary? The answer can only be “yes”; God loves Satan as much as God loves Mary. The difference is not in how God loves them but in how they, each in turn, love God. God loves each of them in the same way, namely, perfectly. But obviously, Mary’s response is very different from Satan’s. In that difference, we see what creates hell: a certain attitude in the face of love. God cannot be offended. God’s love cannot be driven away. God does not reward or punish us on the basis of whether we have been good or bad. God simply loves us. As Martin Luther once said, the desire to be good and to keep the commandments follows from genuine faith and love the way smoke follows fire. The intent is never to earn love or reward but to respond appropriately to them. For those of us who are still struggling to be mature, the spiritual and moral precepts of the faith are meant as a discipline, precisely as discipleship, that helps teach us what it means to be a spiritual and sensitive human being. That is true in the case of mature love and faith. Trying to be good should still not be an attempt to somehow earn love or heaven, but rather a humble acknowledgment that one still needs a lot of help in knowing how to live in the face of love.

We are called to live in the light, but we tend to have an overly romantic idea of what that should mean. We tend to think that to live in the light means that there should be a kind of special sunshine inside of us, a divine glow in our conscience, a sunny joy inside us that makes us constantly want to praise God, and an ambiance of sacredness surrounding our attitude. But that’s unreal. What does it mean to live in the light? Fr. Rolheiser says to live in the light means to live in honesty, pure and simple, to be transparent, and to not have part of us hidden as a dark secret. All conversion and recovery programs worthy of the name are based on bringing us to this type of honesty. We move towards spiritual health precisely by flushing out our sickest secrets and bringing them into the light. Sobriety is more about living in honesty and transparency than it is about living without a certain chemical, gambling, or sexual habit. It’s the hiding of something, the lying, the dishonesty, the deception, the resentment we harbor towards those who stand between us, and the addiction that does the real damage to us and to those we love. Spiritual health lies in honesty and transparency, so we live in the light when we are willing to lay every part of our lives open to examination by those who need to trust us. To live in the light is to be able always to tell our loved ones where we are and what we are doing. To live in the light is not having to worry if someone traces what websites we have visited. To live in the light is to not be anxious if someone in the family finds our files unlocked. To live in the light is to be able to let those we live with listen to what’s inside our cellphones, see what’s inside our emails, and know who’s on our speed dial. To live in the light is to have a confessor and to be able to tell that person what we struggle with without having to hide anything. To live in the light is to live in such a way that our lives are an open book for those who know us.

The Gospel of John presents us with a compelling and somewhat earthy mystical image of the beloved disciple having his head leaning on Jesus’ breast in such a way that his ear is directly above Jesus’ heart but in such a way that his eyes are fixed outward looking at the world. Fr. Rolheiser writes that this represents the beloved disciple attuned to God’s heartbeat and looking out at the world from that vantage point. As the beloved disciple reclines on the breast of Jesus, an interesting dialogue occurs: Jesus tells his disciples that one of them will betray him. Peter turns to the beloved disciple and asks, “Ask him who it is?” That begs the question: Why doesn’t Peter ask Jesus himself who will betray him? Peter would not have been sitting so far away from Jesus that he could not ask the question himself. What the Gospel is suggesting here is that intimacy with Jesus trumps everything else. On the morning of the Resurrection, Mary Magdala comes running from the tomb and tells the disciples that the tomb is empty. Peter and the beloved disciple immediately set off, running towards the tomb. We can easily guess who will arrive there first. The beloved disciple easily outruns Peter, not because he’s perhaps a younger man but because love outruns authority. It is commonly assumed that the beloved disciple was the Evangelist himself, John. That may, in fact, be correct, but that is not what the Gospel text wants you to conclude. Who is the beloved disciple? The beloved disciple is any person, woman, man, or child who is intimate enough with Jesus to be attuned to the heartbeat of God and who then sees the world from that place of intimacy, prays from that place of intimacy, and sets off in love to seek the Risen Lord and grasp the meaning of his empty tomb.

Today, the Church remembers the witnessing of Saint Stephen, the first of the Church’s martyrs. The cruelty of his death is recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, as is how he died, transforming the violence that took his life into an occasion to give witness to an authority greater than those fallen powers who would rule us by fear and threats. Fr. Steve Grunow writes that the Church remembers Saint Stephen today is no accident. Strip away the sentimentality that obscures the story of Christ’s Nativity, and one realizes that Christ came into this world, and from the first instant he showed his infant face, he was opposed. Recall yesterday’s excerpt from the magnificent prologue to the Gospel of John, which testifies that Christ came to his own (us) and his own (again, that means us) “knew him not.” But worse than this, we refused him. And many still do. The Holy Child came ready for this fight, and the world was willing to fight him. However, the world discovered that it was outmatched, and the fallen powers of this world turned against those whom the Holy Child loves. Unable to no longer harm the Body of his human nature, the world strikes at his Body, the Church. Therefore, when the Church remembers its martyrs, like Saint Stephen, it is not merely out of concern that the faithful become conversant in the details of Church history. Instead, it is to keep us honest not only about the past but also about the present. It has never been easy to be a Christian, and being a Christian has always been counter-cultural. If lived authentically, it is lived in defiance against the fallen powers of the world. This means that, like our Savior, we have to be ready. We have to learn the strategy he used to defeat the fallen powers of this world and how he claimed victory when it seemed that these fallen powers could not be defeated. We must learn his strategy enacted in the witness of Saint Stephen and all the Church’s martyrs, past and present- lest, in our opposition to the powers of this world, we become just like them.

Francis of Assisi once said: “Preach the word of God wherever you go, even use words if necessary.”  We might want to reflect upon that, given some of the recent shifts within the churches regarding how we understand the word of God. Fr. Rolheiser tells of his journey while doing graduate studies in Europe. “I was living at a major Seminary. During my last year there, one of the secretaries at the seminary, a deeply Christian and most gracious woman, a young person who was an exemplar wife, mother, and friend of many, died of cancer. I went to her funeral on a bus full of young seminarians and student priests. At her funeral the homily was delivered by one of her uncles, an American priest, who had been flown in for the occasion. He delivered what, to my mind, was one of the best homilies I ever had the privilege of hearing. In it, he picked up this woman’s life as a word of God, related it to the mystery of Christ, and then, with that, both consoled and challenged all of us there, especially her husband and her children. On the way home, on the bus, all the talk among the seminarians was about how dreadful and liturgically inappropriate the homily at been. At one point, I turned to one of the seminarians and said: “I thought the homily was outstanding. Why do you think it was inappropriate?” His answer: “He never used the word of God, he gave a eulogy!” That answer and that indignation, typify a reaction that is growing within the Catholic community. More and more, the idea is that the word of God is perfectly synonymous with the written word of Scripture. For this concept, we are the poorer. Recently a nun shared with me how, at her mother’s funeral, the presiding priest, a young man who had just graduated from a good theology school, had conducted the entire funeral, homily and all, without ever referring to her mother, save for those times when the ritual prayers called for her name. She was, rightly, furious and felt cheated. Her mother had been an extraordinary person, a fine Christian. That day, in church, there was more than the written word to be read. Her mother was a word of God. In her, the word had become flesh and it had dwelt amongst us. That word, sadly, was left unread, uncelebrated. Sometimes I am asked by people who have the responsibility of preaching, priests and laity alike: “Where can you find good stories to use in homilies? How do you bring the word of scripture down to the people’s level?” Those are sincere questions, but not good ones. The task is never to bring the word of God down to people’s level. The task is not to search in books and homiletic aids for good stories. The words and the stories that we need to preach effectively are still being written. They need to be read out of the lives of the people we are ministering to, out of our own lives, and out of the events of the day. The word of God is not a baton, passed on in a relay race. Nor is it a deposit of faith, a treasurer chest of truths handed down from one generation to the next. The word of God something to be eaten, digested, and given flesh to. Reading it requires both eyes: With one eye we scan the bible, with the other we examine what the flesh that has been influenced by it looks like.

Grace. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that we understand grace only when we grasp existentially what’s inside the Father’s words to his older son in the parable of the prodigal son: My son, you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found. The older brother would not be bitter if he understood that everything his father owns is already his, just as he would not be envious of the pleasures his wayward brother tasted if he understood that, in real life, his brother had been dead. But it takes a deeper grasp of what grace is to intuit that, namely, to grasp that life inside God’s house dwarfs all other pleasures.  The same is true for the convert who has given up his wayward life but still secretly rejoices in the experience and sophistication it brought him and nurses a condescending pity for the less-experienced.  He too has not yet really understood grace. In his book, The Idea of the Holy, Rudolf Otto submits that in the presence of the holy we will always have a double reaction: fear and attraction. Like Peter at the Transfiguration, we will want to build a tent and stay there forever; but, like him too before the miraculous catch of fish, we will also want to say: “Depart from me for I am a sinful man.” In the presence of the holy, we want to burst forth in praise even as we want to confess our sins. Only when we understand what the father of the prodigal son means when he says to the older brother: Everything I have is yours”, will we offer both a confession of praise and a confession of sin. The mark of genuine contrition is not a sense of guilt, but a sense of sorrow, of regret for having taken a wrong turn; just as the mark of living in grace is not a sense of our own worth but a sense of being accepted and loved despite our unworthiness. We are spiritually healthy when our lives are marked by honest confession and honest praise.

Bishop Robert Barron writes that today’s Gospel reflects on the pivotal figure of John the Baptist. It’s fair to say that you cannot really understand Jesus without understanding John, which is precisely why all four evangelists tell the story of the Baptist as a kind of overture to the story of Jesus. John sums up Israel, and without the Israelite background, the story of Jesus becomes opaque. The story of John’s birth brings his parents, Zechariah and Elizabeth, into focus. Both are strongly priestly personages. Elizabeth is a descendant of the family of Aaron, the first priest of Israel, and Zechariah was a practicing temple priest. What’s important for our purposes is that John was of very priestly stock. So why, when we first hear of him in his adult life, is he out in the desert and not in the temple? Well, there was a long prophetic tradition that criticized the temple for its corruption. In John’s time, the temple was mired in very messy, vile, and violent politics. So, what is he doing in the desert? He is offering what the temple should be offering but wasn’t due to its corruption, namely, the forgiveness of sins.

Fr. Martin Pable, reflects on our gospel verse, “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord; my spirit rejoices in God my savior” and notes that, Mary, pregnant through the mysterious power of the Holy Spirit, must have felt quite alone. Needing to talk to another woman, she seeks out her aging cousin Elizabeth, who had recently become pregnant. At their meeting, something wondrous occurs: When Elizabeth hears Mary’s greeting, the child in her womb “leaped for joy.” John, the Messenger, salutes Jesus the Message. What went on in that home for the next three months? No doubt Mary helped Elizabeth with household tasks. But I picture long evenings in which Mary, Elizabeth and Zechariah ask each other: “What is the meaning of all this? What is God doing at this moment in our people’s history?” I can imagine Zechariah with a writing tablet saying: “Remember what Isaiah wrote about the Messiah to come? He will save our people from their sins, bring comfort and healing to them, teach us again how God wants us to live.” This is the wonderful mystery, the Visitation, that we recall every Advent.   

This poem celebrates, in the open countryside, a rebirth of nature and love. Just as the fruitfulness of spring overcomes the infertility of winter, love triumphs over the selfishness that imprisons us within ourselves. An allegorical reading of this poem as a celebration of the spousal covenant between God and Israel during the restoration is relatively easy to make. Israel is depicted in many prophetical texts as a vineyard. Also, that literature used the images of devastation and of the Garden of Eden to describe Israel’s unfaithfulness and fidelity. St. John of the Cross writes that “The soul desires that nothing should diminish the delights of love it feels within, a love which is the flower of the soul’s vineyard—not the envious and evil demons, nor the body’s wild desires, nor the vagaries of the imagination, nor the attractions of created things; it calls upon the angels, asking them to root out all these things or prevent their growth, so that they cannot hinder the flowering of interior love; for the sweet taste and delight of that love is the joyful sharing of the virtues and graces that pass between the soul and the Son of God.” Richard Reece also notes that the depths within today’s readings speak to us differently. “Have we been ecstatically in love, waiting excitedly for the arrival of all we have hoped for? Have we been with a child or awaited the birth of a child, surprised or worried, or just bursting with the news and needing to share it with an understanding friend? Today’s Scriptures are not just about us. Elizabeth knows, her unborn child knows, and Mary knows now that the world has been fundamentally, supernaturally changed. After millennia of longing, ‘the winter is past, the rains are over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth,’ and ‘what was spoken by the Lord is fulfilled.’ God is with us.”