Are we looking or just waiting

 

The Mystery of Christmas includes the feasts of the Nativity and the Epiphany. In the Nativity we commemorate God’s humble entrance into human life, incarnated in Jesus. In the Epiphany we celebrate Jesus as God’s gift to the world and openly expresses our longing for intimacy with God. (Matthew 2: 1-12)

The Good News of Christmas and Epiphany is "Emmanuel", "God-with-us!" We, like the Magi need only the light of strong, unwavering faith to see Him, to find Him, to serve Him in the people around us: in the circumstances of our everyday living. We need only to trust in and know as did the Magi, God's love for us…then we will recognize His presence and His power in “sunrise and sunset, in storm and calm, in the faces of children and wisdom of the elderly, in moments of elation and heart-break. We will see His radiance and warmth behind every cloud of sorrow or failure that darkens our days.” (Dan Clendenin, The Journey with Jesus: Notes to Myself)

The Magi went to extraordinary lengths to look for the Christ Child. They serve to remind us that there are those who wait for the coming of the Jesus with those who make the effort to find Him. Like the magi, our search goes on - but so does Epiphany…Are we actively looking or merely waiting… and what gifts do we bring?

It doesn't take a village

 

While the Gospels speak little of Jesus’ life or The Holy Family, before Jesus’ public ministry, historical accounts point out that Jesus was born into a turbulent, dangerous world of political and social upheaval. Serenity and peace were at a premium.  This week our liturgical calendar celebrates The Presentation of Jesus in the temple Luke2:22-40 . Despite the many hardships and challenges, I’m struck by how diligent Mary and Joseph were in discharging their parental duties, as they faithfully adhered to the tenets and practices of their religion.

And so, here we have in Luke’s account of Jesus’ presentation, the ceremonial “brit milah” performed on the eight day following his birth.  Along with Jesus’ parents, there are two other attendants, Simeon and Anna, who upon seeing Jesus, praise and give thanks to God for granting them the opportunity to witness the arrival of the child whom they “recognize” as the fulfillment of the prophecy and the One for whom they waited.  

This story of Jesus’ first religious ritual prompts memories of our own parents’ involvement in the practices of our faith, and although our early memory is lost to our infancy, many of us still cherish the pictures and artifacts that call these rituals to mind, if only second-hand. These memories pay tribute to the personal commitments our parents and caregivers made with regard to our religious development. Like the child Jesus, our religious lineage began with the faithful hopes and practices of our parents and others who may have been responsible for our care.   

As with most of us, my mother and father were responsible for my attending weekly church services and as with most, I often resisted the call; after all, it was Sunday and I could sleep late or go out and play with those friends, who somehow were “excused” from Sunday services. As for the Church, except for worship, there was little in the way of social activities to keep me coming or hold me. We just went to Church and we returned home. Yes, there were choir practices and altar boy calls and during Lent we attended seasonal services, but it was my parents who established the practices, and saw to it that I followed their lead. I had no choice. So, we went, we listened, we learned and eventually patterns were established as requisite attendance became ingrained. 

The decline of the family unit has been linked to a myriad of economic and social problems in our country. It is a fact that our children suffer most from this decline and while we look for help from outside agencies, I often wonder if we are too quick to relegate the care of these precious lives to external resources. There’s a fine line between delegation and abdication. It seems that as the problems grow more severe, additional resources are proposed to expand support for childhood development, and to entrust the educational, social and even religious development of our children to institutions. While help is invaluable and with regard to education, essential, I do not believe that it takes a village to raise a child. Luke’s Gospel reminds me that Jesus didn’t just leap from the manger and begin performing miracles and preaching God’s love. Yes, the focus is on Jesus, but it reminds us of the role Mary and Joseph played in Jesus formative years. Sure times have changed but parental duties in the rearing of children, despite challenges and obstacles, still fall to the loving family unit.

Faith Knows; Belief Explains

 

The Gospel celebrate those events in the life of Christ that serve as models for us to follow and live. Over time many of our original scriptural interpretations that we were taught to believe were often challenged, leaving a void in which literal meanings no longer had  meaning. A sense of  knowing replaced the literal as the Words became flesh in us. The insights that evolved were clearer, simpler, and more beautiful. I’ve come to realize that I am comfortable with mystery and don't feel the need to explain what cannot be explained in words.  

Somehow, the mistrust of mystery and the need to explain mystery has led to a failure of the imagination, evidenced by the childishly comfortable language that we used  to explain it away. Our prayers become a self-centered recitations in which we purport to “confess” our weaknesses by citing our strength. These prayers are anything but the lifting of our hearts and minds to God. How can we listen if we are so busy talking? 

Gerald May writes in The Dark Night of the Soul that “It is the same for all important things in life; there is a mystery within them that our definitions and understandings cannot grasp. Definitions and understandings are images and concepts created by our brains to symbolize what is real. Our thoughts about something are never the thing itself. Further, when we think logically about something, our thoughts come in a logical sequence – one after another. Reality is not confined to such linearity; it keeps happening all at once in each instant. The best our thoughts can do is try to keep a little running commentary in rapid, breathless sequence.”

Now in  the fourth week of Advent we focus on the Annunciation (Luke 1:26-38), a mystery of epic proportions that defies rational explanation. It stuns us to hear some attempt to reduce the virgin birth to a mere story of an unwed pregnant teenager. Have we come to a time when anything that did not stand up to reason or that we couldn’t explain, should be characterized as primitive and infantile? Why do we think that we can confine an almighty spiritual being to man’s intellect and his ability to communicate? Do we not see how metaphor and poetry reveal meaning, not explanation, on a much deeper and intimate level? 

A few years ago we had an opportunity to travel through Eastern Europe, making our way from the Black Sea to Amsterdam. I was taken aback by the devastation in human lives caused by the failure of the “great social experiment,” that created societies whose wealth was shared but only among those at the top. So great buildings were erected for the personal aggrandizement of the elite while sacrificing the welfare of the people who were desperate for food and who desired a modicum of personal enrichment. On the other hand, I was impressed with the number of churches and cathedrals that were reopened after decades of being forced to close. These were flourishing, and while they served as much to support tourism as worship, they were a major presence.

Looking at the beautiful classical paintings and art in these churches, made me wonder what it was that inspired the artists to create poetic images and visual metaphors depicting the “mysteries” of Christianity. It occurred to me that their art was conveyed in a language all its own and derived its source from spiritual inspiration and not the intellect or prescribed  religious interpretation, and while the cynic might deride the image of the Angel Gabriel appearing to Mary, the artist understood it completely.

Art and music are languages of the soul that bypass our senses and speak to us at a level, in a place we cannot explain or know but do we really need explanation for something we feel "way down deep?" 

When we allow God’s love to break through our consciousness as we contemplate the Mysteries of the Annunciation and Virgin birth, do we run from it? Do we ask it to explain what it cannot? Or are we “virgin” enough to surrender to our deepest self and allow it to penetrate our being? We cannot ask it to explain what it cannot.

 

Adversity can play a key role in honing our ability to hear what is beyond the usual scope of our ordinary consciousness. Facing stressful challenges outside the norm of our usual experience can heighten our awareness of events that otherwise would go unnoticed.

“Samuel Johnson put it well “Depend upon it sir, when a man knows he is about to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” It is precisely for such clarity and insight that people seek out desert experiences such as solitary retreats, in which we step away from many of the usual supports of life, family, friends, familiar surroundings and routine, in order to be open to God’s call.

Unlike John-the-Baptist in John 1:6-8, 19-28 , we don’t always get a chance to choose our desert times and places. They sometimes are provided for us in the form of illness, change in employment, failures in relationships, death of a loved one and even, natural disasters. Yet these deserts we’re told all hold new possibilities for hearing the word of God at ever deepening levels.

In the past year much of our focus has been centered on the devastating Pandemic which has altered our lives in ways we have yet to understand. Countless lives have been lost to the Covid 19 virus, which targeted the elderly, the infirmed, and people with co-morbidities. Following active infection ten percent of patients who survive continue to experience ongoing debilitating morbidities attributed to autoimmune "cytokine" storms long after the virus had been cleared from their systems. These patients are euphemistically labelled as “longhaulers.”

The pandemic’s devastating economic impact has resulted in the closing of many businesses, some of which were teetering on the brink of failure and yielded to a Darwinian-like winnowing fork, never to return. Countless jobs, originally furloughed by the demand for people to remain at home, were no longer there when in-person attendance resumed, leaving people who never were without a job, now unemployed for the first time in their lives. 

 Our elementary and schools of higher learning struggled to do whatever they could to salvage a precious year of education, once lost forever gone. 

And yet through what seemed like never ending bad news, there is hope as vaccines are coming available in an optimistic timeframe once considered wishful thinking. 

In recent weeks our Scripture Study discussions revealed that our “spiritual nerves” are raw and “closer to the top of our skin.” We, God knows, didn’t choose these cosmic events. Richard Rohr tells us that there may not be an external Designer and a micro-managing God working from the outside, but neither is the world devoid of His divinity. God’s divinity is so intimately present in the world, in us and through us, that the world can be regarded as an incarnate expression of the Trinity, especially in times of tribulation. The selfless dedication of emergency responders, medical personnel and ordinary people to provide comfort reminds us that God is intimately involved in our lives all the time. (adapted from Richard Rohr, A Spring Within Us “Reframing Our Cosmology”)