The Good Child. Christmas 2011

There are a lot of annoying and genuinely disturbing things about the Advent/Christmas season in the secular world today. There's a lot of materialism and merchants put people under a huge amount of pressure to spend much more than they can afford. Political correctness is rampant and many stores and institutions now refuse to use the word 'Christmas' at all. Radio stations and stores start playing Christmas music in November and by the time Christmas comes, you feel like if you hear, “Have a Holly Jolly Christmas” one more time you'll throw something. All the business promotions make a person feel like Christmas should be so peaceful, warm, positive and fun. Song lyrics and advertising images emphasize the joy and comfort of coming home to family which causes a disconnect in the hearts of many because 'home and family' to them has always meant discord and pain – and Christmas doesn't change that at all. Once you start seeing the all the hype, materialism, pain and empty promises, it's easy to feel like the spirituality of Christmas is in danger of being completely lost.

So, as we move through these last few days of Advent let's turn our focus to something that is beautiful and astounding. Have you ever realized that no other faith has a religious celebration that has affected the world the way the birth of Christ has done and still does? Certainly, the secular world goes to a lot of effort to subvert the real meaning of Christmas but in spite of its best efforts, it fails. It fails because “bonum diffusivum sui” which means, “It is the nature of goodness to diffuse itself.” When Jesus was born, goodness and light took up residence in the world and, as John 1:5 says, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” It still hasn't. Never will.

No matter how the world tries to cash in on the Christmas season and no matter how much those who are politically correct try to deflect attention away from the name of Christ or from the reason we celebrate, light emitting goodness saturates the whole season. This is God's glow of goodness because good cannot exist outside of him. And at Christmas it seems like he is especially exuberant in the diffusion of his goodness. Every act of giving whether it's based in Christian values or not comes from the goodness of God and every person, company or institution that gives in any way is an instrument of God whether they know it or not. It's as if the light of Christ's birth cannot be overcome no matter how much the secular world shies away from acknowledging it.

When I listen to the radio, watch T.V., read the newspapers and scan the internet, I am boggled by the efforts of so many to minister to the poor during Advent and Christmas. There are empty stocking funds, penny drives, charity concerts and a multitude of Christmas meals being offered to those who can't afford one. And food bank drives! Two radio stations in our city had a contest to see which station could get the most food collected. A local business invited people to come by with food and gift items and try to fill up the back of a trailer truck. Even our municipal garbage collectors are having a food drive. Individuals are doing random acts of great kindness. People volunteer to stand outside in the cold to ring bells and collect money for the poor and everyone generously tips coins into the kettle on their way past.

We have a choice. We can look at the negative. We can cry foul because we feel like Jesus is being left out. We can be cynical about a corporation's motivations in providing a meal or collecting items for the food bank. We can shake our heads at how Santa is better known than Christ. We can focus on the darkness. Or we can start seeing that when a holy infant was born into the world, the world lost the battle against the light. The Light could not and cannot be kept down. Christmas could be outlawed completely and the light would still shine. Goodness would still come bubbling up through the cracks because darkness cannot overcome the light.

“And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.” (John 1:14)

Rejoice, people of God! There is good news of great joy for all of you: to you is born this day a Saviour, who is the Messiah, the Lord. The world will try to shut him up. It will nail him to a cross. It will twist his words and subvert his truths. It will try to make money off of him. It will attempt to replace him, negate him, eliminate him and make him into a myth.

But the world cannot do it. It is fighting a losing battle. So, lift up your hearts, seek the face of the infant in every act of goodness and generosity you come across. Soon you will see him everywhere and you will know: The child has won.

Because you just can't keep a good God down.

A blessed, holy and Good Christmas to you all and I also wish you a full, gracious and peaceful celebration of Mary, the Mother of God on New Years. I will be taking a bit of a 'blog break' for that week.

4th Sunday in Advent. The Great Disturbance

Luke 1: 26-38
In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. And he came to her and said, ‘Greetings, favoured one! The Lord is with you.’ But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be. The angel said to her, ‘Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favour with God. And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. He will reign over the house of Jacob for ever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.’ Mary said to the angel, ‘How can this be, since I am a virgin?’ The angel said to her, ‘The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God. And now, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren. For nothing will be impossible with God.’ Then Mary said, ‘Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.’ Then the angel departed from her.

There was a humorous story with variations going around on the internet recently about a woman wondering why her husband was being quiet and withdrawn. In her head, she explored myriads of possible reasons, all having to do with the history of their relationship, current problems and what she may have done to upset him. Her reasonings and conclusions were multiple and complex. Then we get an insight into what the guy was thinking: “My truck won't start.”

The Gospel this week says that Mary was much perplexed. In my Jerusalem bible it says that she was deeply disturbed. I'm thinking that Luke at some point asked Mary about that moment of annunciation and Mary tried very hard to explain what it was like to have an angel speaking those particular words to her. Luke probably listened patiently for a long time and then wrote down, “She was disturbed.”

Fair enough. The Gospels were not written as mini-novellas with all the characters' thoughts and feelings opened up to us. They are records of specific events and the teachings of Jesus. Still, there are times when I'm reading the Gospels that I wish the writer could have written a little more than the bare facts. On the other hand, Luke probably could have written a whole book about Mary being deeply disturbed. I prefer 'deeply disturbed' to 'much perplexed' because I think she experienced something infinitely more profound than simple confusion or puzzlement over some words of greeting the angel said to her. When I read that Mary was deeply disturbed, it makes me think of a body of still water over which a strong wind begins gusting, sweeping and swirling. A Ruah wind. The wind of the Spirit was rushing over her and through her, moving her and evoking senses within her that were completely foreign yet strangely familiar - like echoes of a home known long long ago in a place somewhere far beyond memory.

The Spirit was roiling the waters in the depths of Mary's being. The moment the angel spoke, she was no longer just 'Mary'. She was 'Full of Grace' or 'Favored One'. She was “Blessed Among Women”. She had heard her true name and knew that nothing would ever be the same again. The dictionary meaning of the verb 'disturb' is “interfere with the normal arrangement or functioning of”. It wasn't just Mary's surface emotions that God was disturbing deeply; God was in the process of disturbing her whole inner and outer life.

Our God is a disturbing God. But you shouldn't take that statement and think it simply means the struggles and challenges we all deal with every day. It's not just another way of saying that life is messy. God seeks to disturb you in the same way he disturbed Mary. He calls you by the Name he has chosen for you and if you listen for that name, hear it in your innermost being and, like Mary, respond with, ‘Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word,’ you will know a disturbance like no other. Like Mary, you will hear echoes of home. You will never be the same, your life will never be the same and you wouldn't want it any other way.

The Advent time of conception, waiting and bringing to birth can be a beautifully disturbing time if you allow it to go deep. It is the Name God calls you by that invites you and it is the 'Yes!' of your heart that opens you. One of the reasons the Magnificat is so wonderful is because Mary was revelling in her name. She knew she was a lowly servant but at the same time she also knew and fully accepted with joy that she was Blessed Among Women and that all generations would call her Blessed. She knew she was a vessel being used to bring forth the Son of God but she also knew how immensely and intimately loved she was. Her vocational Name and call was to bring forth the Son and in giving her assent, she found her true self. God called Mary to a role in salvation history that none of us will ever experience but that doesn't mean we aren't called, like Mary, to listen, hear, respond and find our true selves in the eyes of the Father. She was the first mystic of the New Testament and opened the way for us all. She didn't live in a monastery or have a lifestyle we normally associate with contemplatives. Anyone who looked at her without knowing the details of what was happening would have said she was an ordinary woman living an ordinary life.

This period leading up to Christmas is often hard on us in many ways. It's a time of inconveniences, weariness, pressure and often pain and loneliness but this is where God meets us and where he calls our names. Mary's Advent was also full of these things. Life was also disturbing on the surface for Mary and it is disturbing for us. But this is the chosen birthplace of the Son of God – in the midst of chaos, struggle, woundedness and uncertainty.

Nothing became easier for Mary because she said yes to her Name and to her God. She wasn't exempt from the challenges of life. In fact, it became infinitely more challenging and complex for her. But Mary had been given a profound knowledge of something we all have access to within our Names: a deep-seated knowledge that God is. That's it. God is. It's hard to finish that sentence with one adjective. We can say he is mighty but within that mightiness is a helpless infant. We can say he is awesome but within that awesomeness is a God who overshadows us in intimacy. We can say he is holy but within that holiness is complete accessibility, a God who humbly waits for us to crawl into his arms. The knowledge that 'God is' sets us free to be wide open to infinite possibility.

We can resist the challenges we face or we can open our hearts to allow the disturbance to go deep. We can allow ourselves to crash up against our solid God and suddenly discover, as Mary did, that God's solidity is like liquid gold that pours into our hearts and stirs up sudden remembrances of who we really are: Advent people, Christmas people, people who belong to another world altogether, people who are strangers in a strange land and are on a pilgrimage home. But before that we must learn how to allow ourselves to be disturbed, how to allow the ruah wind to drive us deep into the Shekina overshadowing, a shadow made of fiery light. We need to learn how to be open to bringing the Child of the Light to birth in the small part of the world where God has placed us.



During this last week of Advent, try praying as often as you can, “Let it be done to me according to your word.”



And prepare to be deeply disturbed.

3rd Sunday in Advent. The Gaudete Path

This week, I will be reflecting on the first reading, (Isaiah 61: 1-2, 10-11), the psalm (Luke 1) and the Gospel (John 1: 6-8, 19-28). If you want to quickly check these readings, go to bible.oremus.org/ This is a great site for looking up scripture and the translation is the same as the Catholic Lectionary.

In this week's readings we hear the words of Isaiah, Mary and John: the Gaudete Three. Each one was anointed by God to be Christ bearers and each one experienced a different essence of rejoicing. We need to spend some time with the quality of rejoicing each one experienced. None of them entered into rejoicing because life was easy and uncomplicated or because everything was going their way. From these three we learn that their spiritual rejoicing emerged not out of pleasant experiences but out of a full relationship with God, out of the anointing that was upon them and out of their deep desire to be all that God called them to be. If we are to be a rejoicing people, we have to know where true rejoicing comes from.

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,” Isaiah wrote. As God anointed him to bring his living word to a wayward people, he was given a glimpse of the coming Christ and was filled with the knowledge that there was more to come than an eternity of God angrily chiding his people into obedience. Listen to what he says in the first reading: “I will greatly rejoice in the Lord, my whole being shall exult in my God; for he has clothed me with the garments of salvation, he has covered me with the robe of righteousness.” Then he speaks of the bride and bridegroom and his joy is the joy of knowing that the Beloved is coming and he is coming with gifts. He will bring beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning and the garment of praise for a spirit of heaviness. Isaiah saw the face of the Jesus, the bridegroom who was coming to give himself completely for his loved one and to bind up her wounds and heal her shame. He foretold the virgin birth and he gave us images of the suffering Christ seven hundred years before the advent of Jesus. Isaiah's rejoicing came from being privileged to understand that God had a plan that was beyond anything anyone could imagine. Isaiah didn't know if the Messiah would come in one year or several hundred years but still he rejoiced because he had seen the perfection of completion and knew that the Messiah was coming to save not only the future people of God but also all people in all of history, himself included. Isaiah was caught up in the timeless compassion and goodness of his God.

Mary! Mary possessed Pondering Joy. God anointed her to bring the Joy of all joy to birth but in the beginning of her pregnancy she had no idea what this would eventually look like. Everything about her pregnancy was completely out of line with the common perception of the promise and it was all so much bigger than what her mind could grasp. So she became a child and a woman of contemplative joy. Contemplative joy comes from complete abandonment to God. It does not demand immediate answers to immediate problems nor does it require God to conform to any presupposed ideas. As soon as Mary said, “Let it be done to me according to your word,” she lost herself and gained insight into the quiet but explosive creativity of God. She was a vessel of his creative love. Pain and difficulty were already her companions but instead of being foes that she had to conquer, they were friends to attend her on her way because she trusted completely in the love of her God. “My soul magnifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour...” Her rejoicing ran deep and flowed straight to the heart of God – a river of connectedness, a current of immense trust that caused her to exclaim, “Surely from now on all generations will call me blessed.” She felt so blessed and her joy overflowed.

“The rejoicing of John.” That sounds like an oxymoron. In scripture he seems like a terribly serious figure, so sure of who he was that it didn't bother him in the least to publicly and loudly point out hypocrisy and sin where he saw it - and he saw it everywhere. He knew his anointing was to prepare the way for the appearance of the Christ and no one was going to deter him. Because we tend to think of rejoicing as a happy emotion, it's a bit difficult to envision John rejoicing. But sometimes rejoicing has very different overtones from those of exultant happiness.

I would guess that John rejoiced with an awesomely serious joy, a joy that was born in and shaped by an unforgiving wilderness. That kind of joy would be a joy with no excess baggage and very few expectations created out of self-oriented desires. It would have been a stark joy of simple purpose and few distractions and anyone who saw joy as a lovely feeling might not have looked at what John carried in his heart and called it 'joy' or labelled his responses 'rejoicing'. It may have looked more like grief to them and they would have been partly right. What they couldn't have seen was the understanding that this terrible need to cry out to a deaf and blind people was balanced by a knowledge of momentous promise. Perhaps he was given a grave and solemn vision of all the stars and planets in the universe lining up in honor of the One who was about to begin everything the earth and heavens had been waiting for. I believe that out in the wilderness, John knew that all creation was waking up to the realization that the Christ had come and the Christ was ready. It was time. The joy he felt made him want to roar, "People... WAKE UP!"

In the reflection for the first Sunday of Advent I asked you think about what you wanted from God for Christmas. At Mass that week, our priest asked the people of the parish a wonderful question: “What do you want to give birth to this Christmas?” Within the answer to either of these questions is your anointing and your path of rejoicing. Will you be like Isaiah, a man or woman of far-reaching vision, speaking of the promise of the coming Christ? Will you be like Mary, a quietly surrendered but strong vessel of the beauty of Jesus – someone who is pregnant with hope? Will you be like John, determined to clear a way for the one who will save, heal and baptize with the fire of the Spirit?

It is your anointing that will fill you with a kind of rejoicing that cannot come from anything in this world and depends on nothing the world has to offer. The anointing of the Gaudete Three is your anointing. The same Spirit of the Lord is upon you and he has sent you to bring good news to the poor. He has clothed you with the same garment of salvation as Isaiah. He has looked with favor on you and has done great things for you like he did for Mary. And God has anointed you to bring the same knowledge of salvation to the people as John did.

He is coming. He is here. He is ready. Oh people! Find your path of rejoicing.