Feast of the Holy Family

Today's Feast has not always been one with which I could resonate well because I grew up in what would euphemistically be called a "dysfunctional" family in which love was a difficult and sometimes difficult-to-find reality. Thus, the symbol of the Holy Family was one I was sure I did not understand and might never really come close to understanding. On the other hand,  both then and now, I have had many really profound experiences of  "family" in a broader and less formal sense including families who "adopted me" (again, in an informal but real sense), in music groups, with friends throughout school, via parish communities, and with Sisters with whom I lived in community or otherwise shared the values and bonds of religious life. 

In all of these, I learned the importance and challenge of loving and being loved into wholeness, that is, loving and being loved in a way that allowed my deepest potential as a person to be realized. And yet, that wasn't always an easy thing to allow! It took and still takes the focused work I associate with spiritual direction, the deep and intense silence of prayer, and the community in all its forms that grounds and renders meaningful and coherent the eremitical solitude that represents the context, charism, and goal of my own life with God. Luke's infancy narrative gives an account of Mary's single powerful "Fiat!" and notes, "She pondered all these things in her heart," which points to a process extending far beyond that single "Fiat". Coming to be the bearer of Light and Life God wills us each to be in Christ takes innumerable "Yes-es" -- and not a few no's as well! The pondering we do in our hearts is not always peace-filled, and the Magnificat we learn to sing with our lives may be more compelling for the dissonances and darkness that continue to mark it in various ways.

 (Reprise) Christmas is a season of Joy not because there is no darkness, no sin, no oppression, or death, but because it reminds us that God has made of our humanity a sacrament of (his) own life and light in spite of the continuing presence of these other realities. History has become the sanctuary of the transcendent and eternal God. Our God is now Emmanuel (God-with-us) and we, the littlest and the least have been ennobled (and revealed as made noble!) beyond anything we might otherwise have imagined. In and through Christ we too are called to be Emmanuel for our world, in and through the Christ Event we are each made to be temples of the Holy Spirit. As Advent reminded us, we live in "in-between" times, a time of already but not-yet. There is work to be done, and suffering we will still experience. But the light and joy of Christmas is real and something which will inspire and empower all that still needs to be done: caring for, loving (!) the least and littlest so they truly know they are the dwelling places of God; opposing the Herods of this world in whatever effective way we can so the Kingdom of God may be more fully realized by divine grace through time; allowing the joy and potential of the Christ's nativity in our world and ourselves to grow to its proper fullness of grace and stature as we embrace authentic humanity and holiness.

My very best wishes to all on this Feast of the Holy Family and my special thanks to the Sisters of the Holy Family (Fremont, CA) for the charism embodied by the members of their congregation and the mission they embrace so selflessly. As they mark the renewal of their vows on this feast we celebrate that they have been and remain a light to the littlest and the least amongst us, to the lost, the abandoned and rejected, to the homeless or those who are otherwise without families, and to all those who have found in them a compassionate Presence capable in Christ of healing the wounds occasioned by the sin and death at work in our world and sometimes in our own families. I personally locate them at the crossroads of Mercy and Grace and I know I am not alone in this.

Called to Clap and Cheer: Embracing an Advent-Christmas Attitude toward the Future (Reprise from 2015)

In Advent: Shaping our Lives in Light of the Future I wrote that Advent is about preparing to embrace and embracing the future, especially the future revelation of God, rather than hanging onto the past as an adequate model of what will one day be. I reminded readers that our cosmos is an unfinished reality and that we are on the way to the day when Christ will "come to full stature" and God will be all in all. I also noted that theologians and exegetes today read the Genesis creation and fall narratives very differently than they once did --- not as pointing to a completed and perfected universe which then, through human disobedience or sin, fell from perfection, but instead to a perfected universe still coming to be.

Such a new reading does not leave human sinfulness out of the picture nor does it even change our definition of it much. It is still very much about an ungratefulness we link with disobedience and "falling short" of the reality God calls us to be and embrace in our loving, our stewardship of life in all of its forms and stages, and our worship of the One Creator God. Sin is still about substituting our own versions of God for the real One based on partial and fragmentary revelations and being "satisfied" with a religion whose focus is too much on the now-dead past while we resist (i.e., we fail to entrust everything in faith to) the ever-surprising God who wills to make everything definitively new. Sin is about enmeshment in this passing world and its fragmentary vision; it shows itself in resistance to the coming Kingdom (the sovereignty and realm) of God which is already in our midst in a proleptic way and seeks to pervade and transfigure all we are and know. Sin is about our resistance or lack of openness to the qualitatively new and surprising (kainetes), the reality we know as an eternal or absolute future; when we embrace or otherwise become enmeshed in that lack of openness we are left only with the world of transience and death. After all, sin and death, in all of their forms and degrees are precisely about a lack of future.

Today's readings from Isaiah and Matthew fit very well in underscoring these dynamics, both those of Advent and the futurity it inaugurates and celebrates, as well as of sin and its resistance to newness and future. Isaiah's language is classic for us. He reminds us that so long as we are disobedient to the Commandments of God we have no future; we will not prosper. I think today we need to hear the term "Commandments" as referring to those imperatives of gratefully loving, stewarding life, and worshiping God which are the keys to any authentic futurity. Obedience is a matter of hearkening to these, that is, being open and attentive to them in all of the ways and places they come to us as we embrace whatever they call us to. Obedience is the responsive behavior of those who are grateful.

The Gospel lection tells a wonderful story of prophetic and messianic gifts of God (symbolized most fully by John the Baptist and Jesus of Nazareth) given freely to God's People --- only to be met with narrow-minded criticism and hardhearted ingratitude. God is trying to do something new, trying to bring creation to fulfillment in a "New Creation" of freedom, holiness, and eternal life; human beings representing God's chosen people are resistant. Now John the Baptist himself had come to wonder if Jesus was really the Messiah John had prepared people for; things were looking bad for both John and Jesus and Jesus did seem to be pretty different than the One John had been proclaiming.

Jesus responded to John's questions by pointing to the things God was doing through him to give the blind and crippled a new and full future --- just as Isaiah had promised. Then Jesus uses the image of children engaged in petty bickering as they play games mimicking weddings and funerals. It is important to note that these are ordinarily the most joyful and poignant celebrations of life, love, and the hope of a future grounded in the God we know. Similarly, funerals are those moments marking the terrible sadness and grief of sin and death in separation from God --- though they too may be transformed into celebrations of an eternal hope and future. Jesus reminds the adults listening to him that --- in something that was deadly serious --- God played them a dirge (called them to serious repentance and conversion) culminating in the prophet John and a wedding hymn in Jesus his Anointed One, but they resisted and rejected both. Instead, they criticized John as a crazy person and called Jesus a drunkard and glutton. Theological arrogance, religious complacency (lukewarmness) or superiority, outright cynicism or hardheartedness --- whatever the roots of this ingratitude it gave no room at all to a faith (trust) that allowed God to do something new in and with our world.

Because Christmas and the exhaustive incarnation of God is, in some ways, not yet complete; because we look forward to the day when Christ will finally come to full stature (cf., Paul to the Ephesians), both Isaiah and Matthew are urging us to adopt an attitude of gratitude and joyful openness to the God of Newness and the future we know as life in God. It is an attitude that contrasts radically with that of the children playing their games in today's gospel or of those rejecting Jesus and John and the Kingdom they inaugurate. Harold Buetow tells the following story which captures the childlike humility, excitement, gratitude, and openness we are to have in relation to the awesome Christmas drama of the New Creation God is authoring right now in our lives and world.

[[Little Jimmie was trying out for a part in the school [Christmas] play. He'd set his heart on being in it though his mother feared he wouldn't be chosen. On the day when the parts were awarded, with some trepidation his mother went to collect him after school. Jimmie rushed up to her, eyes shining with pride and excitement: "Guess what, Mom," he shouted, and said, "I've been chosen to clap and cheer!"]]

I am especially struck by how really involved and aware, how truly attentive to and appreciative of the work occurring right in front of oneself one must be to "clap and cheer" (or to be raptly silent!) in ways which support and move the drama of God's will forward. Isn't this the attitude of praise and gratitude evident in God's followers all throughout the centuries? Isn't this the attitude merited by an unfinished universe moving mysteriously but inexorably toward the day when its Creator God will be all in all?  And isn't this the attitude of obedient anticipation Advent asks each of us to cultivate?

The story of Jimmie's call is from Harold Buetow's, Walk in the Light of the Lord, A Thought a Day for Advent and Christmastide, Alba House, 2004. (Friday, 2nd Week of Advent, p 40.)

Third Week of Advent: What Did you Come to See?

What did you come out to the desert to see? You've heard the rumors of this man named John and of me (Jesus) as well, so what did you come out here seeking? Was it a reed blowing in the wind, a so-called "prophet" moved by every cultural current and whim, or was it someone more authentic with a word that is lasting, solid, and eternal --- like the truth of God? What are you, you who are neither followers of John nor disciples of mine looking for? You heard that John in his way and I in mine proclaimed the Word of God. You heard people calling us prophets. Were you expecting us to be dressed in worldly finery and the trappings of political, religious, or ecclesiastical honor, prestige, and power? Is that what you really hoped for? Is it what you needed? Please ask yourself these questions!!! And please answer them honestly, from the depths of your hearts! What did you travel into the desert to see? What do you need?!

Today's gospel starts out this way with Jesus asking the crowd who have attended both John's disciples and his own to examine their hearts, first so they might understand their own motives in seeking him and John the Baptizer out, and then too, that they might get in touch with their truest and deepest needs and yearnings, needs and yearnings that can only be met or filled by the God who created and completes them as human beings. As it moves along, today's Gospel also promises these folks that they will be surprised and that God's answer to what they were seeking may look very different than they were expecting. And isn't this how it is for each of us whenever God reveals Godself to us? To Jesus' questions then, we might add one more that is implicit in all he says in this gospel lection, namely, "Are you prepared to be surprised by God? Will you allow that?" There is a corollary here too, "Will you receive him; indeed, will you follow him even if he comes as one whose power is manifested in weakness, his justice in mercy, and whose glory is most perfectly revealed in crucifixion and shame?

Jesus' questions are always some of the most important texts in the New Testament. They provoke, invite, and empower us to enter into a process of introspection, self-appraisal, and clarification leading to real conversion. In these few sentences in today's gospel lection, Jesus implicitly focuses us on the ways we run hither and yon looking for "something" to fill the emptiness, something to make sense of our confusion and existential lostness, something that can serve as a means to anchor our lives and still our constant restlessness. 

He calls to mind all the false solutions we substitute for the real thing: power, prestige, the favor of the powerful and honored, wealth, worldly success, etc. and reminds us of how these leave us hungry and thirsty for something more and other. At the same time, Jesus encourages us to recognize that Divine wisdom is not always clothed in the vestments of ecclesiastical or civil authority we usually submit to, for example. This, of course, is one of the reasons the Magi (who, whether they are astrologers or kings or something else entirely, are certainly symbolic representations of the wisdom and power of this world) will offer gifts and bow down to a helpless child. God comes to us in surprising ways that turn our expectations on their heads, even as he reveals and fulfills our deepest needs and yearnings.

As we journey toward the feast of the Nativity of Jesus, it's a good time to let him put his questions to us as well. It is one way the valleys and mountains of our own hearts and minds are either filled or made low and the highway of our God made straight within us --- one of the ways the Kingdom of God is brought near and an incarnate God allowed to take up residence with and within us. As we bustle around in our Christmas preparations what is it we are really preparing ourselves for? What, indeed, have we come out to see?