Welcoming the New Year with Praise

As the New Year dawns, many see this as an opportunity for all kinds of excitement and insobriety.   For others, the New Year is something to dread with great anxiety.   But for souls whom God has graced with the gift of prayer, this passage of time is a new moment in which to keep the eyes of the heart fixed on the Son of Man.  

Time resonates with God's heartbeat of love.   In every moment of time there is a new kind of Presence of God disclosed to the world drawing it in the power of the Holy Spirit to the Word made flesh and at the same time moving the world beyond itself, to something new and wonderful, something that evokes adoration.  If time endures all kinds of misery and disappointments, evil does not ultimately define time -- rather the duration of every difficulty, just as is the case in the duration of every joy, is pregnant with something greater than time is able to contain.  There is an eternal hope that lives in even the worst situations, a hope that lifts time to a greater fullness than the poverty of the present moment allows us to see, but in which we can believe none-the-less.

What is the reason for this hope?   The loving presence of Christ who stands with us and whose word never passes away - with Him we have reason to stand firm, to love without counting the cost.  He, the Fullness of Life Himself, is the very center, the heart of human history and of each one's personal history.  At every occasion, no matter how humble or hidden, an encounter with Christ is awaiting us on both the most personal and the most public dimensions of our existence.  Faith seeks this encounter and in a single moment learns to surrender to everything the Lord lavishes upon it, and this over and over again in the most unexpected ways.  

His unrepeatable presence is what makes this Year a new gift from God, and those who embrace Him and faithfully cleave to Him in the new and unique ways our personal and social histories make possible, such believers will know again an ancient joy that can never grow old.  For them, the New Year is neither an occasion for insobriety or anxiety or to lose heart for any reason.  For these faithful souls, the New Year is a gift, an occasion of thanksgiving, a new opportunity to lift up our hearts, to cry out in recognition in the midst of both sorrow and joy: such is the praise offered by a soul that seeks the progress of eternity in each moment of time.

Reverent Love and Family Life

The Christmas Mystery raises prayer to the warmth and light of motherhood and family.   These primordial elements of our common humanity God Himself has made sacred by associating them with Himself.   He did so in a singular way when the Word became flesh, when the source of all Meaning entered into the hardships, doubts, fears, and insecurities of our alienated humanity, a painful existence which so needs to be loved.   When Divinity infused our poverty with its treasures, the very relationship of mother to child was endowed in a particular way with new and eternal meaning, a truth that surpasses all understanding.   Here, the unfathomable reality of what it means to be family is disclosed to the eyes of faith and after all these centuries, we have not even begun to penetrate these riches. 

In our efforts to love one another, to renounce what we think we want so that there is room in our lives for family and new life, to be patient with the sorrows we inevitably cause each other, to persevere with one another’s weakness, to defer to one another, to resist contention and false judgment, to speak the truth with love even at the risk of being misunderstood, to share a reason for our hope, to be merciful even to the point of appearing to be taken advantage of; in all of this, when lived out with the same tender reverence that Mary and Joseph showed one another in their own struggles to make a home for the Christ-child; in this very effort, though fraught with all kinds of weakness and inadequacy, failures and shortcomings, trials and hardships, a joyful echo of the Father’s saving whisper into the heart of humanity resounds; a whisper to which faith listens and hears anew, amid angel’s choirs, those divine but distressed cries in the darkness of a cold night wrapped in our swaddling clothes.

The Coming of Christmas and the Mystery of the Visitation

The Visitation, like the Annunciation, is one of the great mysteries we think about as we prepare for Christmas.  These sacred events form us and prepare us for the special way the Lord wants to visit us this Christmas.   The Annunciation refers to the conversation of the Archangel Gabriel with Mary and the Visitation refers to the seventy five mile journey Mary made from Galilee to a little village on the outskirts of Jerusalem (traditionally, Ain Karem or the Spring of the Vineyard) to serve her elderly cousin Elizabeth who was pregnant with John the Baptist.

The loving service Mary made haste to show Elizabeth was the result of the prayerful encounter she had through the ministry of the Angel: Gabriel explained that her cousin's remarkable pregnancy would be a sign confirming his even more remarkable announcement to the Mother of the Messiah.  Mary made haste to her cousin not merely to have confirmation for herself -- even more, she realized her cousin needed her.

The whole mystery of Christmas and all the events that lead up to it is a mystery of love - divine love entering into human love and human love allowing itself to be directed by divine love.  It is a mystery of apostolic contemplation.

All Christian contemplation -- when it is truly Christian -- follows the pattern of the Annunciation and the Visitation -- prayer not only enjoys the presence of God, but it is a threshold into apostolic action.  To be an apostle is to be sent and Gabriel's words to Mary contained this apostolic dimension -- if historically apostolate was part of preparing for the Messiah, then today apostolate must be part of our mystical preparation to celebrate God's presence among us in Christ Jesus.

What is true of Mary is true for all believers:  heavenly encounters compel us to love one another more fiercely and more tenderly.  While every day of the Christian life should be an experience of this mystery, Advent is a special time when -- in the midst of these darker and colder days when people tend to need each other just a little more than at other times - we allow the Lord to touch us with His generous love so that we might love one another a little more generously in return.

Mary and the Mystery of the Coming of Christmas

In these special days just before Christmas, the Church calls to mind, among other things, the grace of the Annunciation, that extraordinary visit of the Angel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary.   St. Bernard addresses the Virgin of Nazareth telling her that all of Heaven holds its breath waiting for her to give her answer.  He begs her to open herself to the Word of the Father by the praise and thanksgiving she offers through her human word.  This address to Mary is also an address to the whole Church, to all baptized Christians who animated by Christ constitute His Mystical Body.   

All of heaven holds its breath waiting for the Church today to welcome the Word made flesh anew, in our own time, in our own culture, in our own hearts.  This means that each of us as a responsibility to live lives of thanksgiving and praise.   Such a life constantly avails itself to the wonders God reveals in this present moment of our lives.   This kind of life is carried by gratitude for the man undeserved gifts of love lavished upon us without our even having to have asked.   This kind of life is lifted up in praise even in the face of sorrow, pain and hardship - because this kind of life knows that what most defines reality, our personal reality, is not evil or failure - but rather God's love.  And this kind of life lives for love, lives by love, lives in love -- it also knows the honor of dying by love as well.

Advent, these days where the whole Church strains for the coming of the Lord, these hectic days of social gatherings and hospitality and shopping and decorating and writing greetings and working and entertaining excited children and comforting impatient adults, these stressful days of preparing for family reunions or travel or else being burdened with the thought of loneliness or abandonment or the lack of basic necessities -- these are the days where we must also find time for silence: that sacred silence in which we open wide the doors of our hearts to the Word of the Father,  that peaceful silence that allows Him to repose in our hearts just as He reposed in womb of Mary.  In this wondrous silence of praise and thanksgiving, no matter the hardships and the blessings we might know, the Word of the Angel to the Mother of the Lord is also a Word to us in these beautiful days of joy and sorrow, anxiety and hope.

A New Liberty for Humanity

God loves to work through human freedom -- the freer humanity is, the more freely God manifests His Glory.  To help us find this spiritual liberty, John the Baptist was sent to prepare the way of the Lord.   His message was a very simple call to act justly and honestly.  The effort to live our lives morally upright levels the pathway for the Messiah.  What was true in that historical coming of Christ is true in the spiritual ways He continues to come into our hearts: the Lord is able to more freely come into the world when we devote ourselves to doing what is right and to overcoming evil with what is good.

We have a great advantage over those who heard the preaching of the Baptist.   They did not know that the promise was already fulfilled in a manner that surpassed all expectation:  the Son of God had come into the world.  They repented of sin and lived justly based solely on the promise that He would come -- without fully understanding just who "He" would be.

Yet their faith in the shadow of so great a reality was enough for them to begin to get ready, enough for them to repent, enough to realize they needed salvation, to begin to love and respect one another again.  We have an even greater reason for this kind of living faith - for we do not live in the shadow of a promise, but we live in communion with the fulfillment of that promise: the Living Image of the Invisible God continually comes by mystery into the broken and impoverished places of our lives because He has already come into history and loved us in poverty - the poverty of a babe in swaddling clothes.

Faith in Christ brings a new liberty to humanity.   By infusing our poverty, our weakness, our voids, our failures, our inadequacies with His Presence, all these things that would otherwise impede our efforts to love are now infused with an even greater love - God's love.   Renunciation of a hidden sin that no one might notice, renunciation of amusements that do not give glory to God, renunciation of a little comfort at the end of a long day, renunciation of the need to win an argument, renunciation of the need to be noticed - whenever we make these little renunciations out of love for Jesus, we discover our poverty and in discovering our poverty we open ourselves to the coming of Life, the coming of Truth, and this in a greater Way than we have ever known before.  This is the new freedom, the spiritual liberty, that the Christ child comes to bring humanity.