Memento mori on the Third Sunday in Ordinary Time

I think it was a Peter Seeger who used to sing a little ditty that went:

I get up each morning and gather my wits, 

I pick up the paper and read the obits. 

And if I’m not there, I know I’m not dead, 

so I eat a good breakfast and go back to bed.

I never understood that song when I was younger, but now I live it.

You know, there were seventy-five obituaries in the Telegram this pasr week. A lot of them in their nineties, like Daniel and Christine and Barbara and Raymond and Jennie and Josephine and Dennis and Margaret… Still sad for their families, but they don’t jump out at you.

But then there are the other ones, the ones I notice a lot more since I turned 68. Like Johnny at 65 or Dan at 61 and Eric at 60 and Patricia, who the obituary said died after a brave fight with Covid at the age of 58. Those kinds get to me, but then there’s Chris, who died at 33 or Daryl, who had a heart attack at 41.  I tend to stop reading when I get to those.

That kind of an obituary is what is referred to as a memento mori, a reminder of death…and not just someone else’s death. My death. The kind we will speak indelicately about when we start Lent next month: “Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.”

It’s why the Roman Missal from which I pray at that altar has a Mass for the Grace of a Happy Death. I pray it much more lately than I ever did before. Here’s the opening Collect:

O God, who have created us in your image
and willed that your Son should undergo death for our sake, 

grant that those who call upon you
may be watchful in prayer at all times,
so that we may leave this world without stain of sin
and may merit to rest with joy in your merciful embrace. 

It’s a wise sentiment as old as the ancients, as the stoic philosopher Seneca once wrote: “Let us prepare our minds as if we’d come to the very end of life. Let us postpone nothing. Let us balance life’s books each day. … The one who puts the finishing touches on their life each day is never short of time.”

Perhaps you’ve heard of those Roman triumphs, when a great general would be rewarded for his victory by passing beneath an arch amidst the cheering throngs. But few noticed the soldier always positioned in the chariot right behind the general, and as the crowds grew louder he would shout into the general’s ear: “Respice post te. Hominem te esse memento. Memento mori!” Look behind you. Remember you are mortal. Remember you must die!

Social Security has a digitized memento mori conveniently included on their site at ssa.gov. It’s innocuously entitled a “life expectancy calculator,” and all it asks for is you gender and date of birth and with the click of the return key it informs me that I probably have 17.6 years left. Not 17.5 or 17.7, mind you, but 17.6. 

I should probably start planning.

Indeed….I probably should. For despite the Social Security Administration, Jesus tells me I will know not the day nor the hour, and, as Paul practically screams at the Corinthians: “I tell you, brothers and sisters, the time is running out…the world in its present form is passing away!”

He’s like a modern day Jonah, finally doing what the Lord told him to do (after getting thrown overboard, eaten by a whale and spat up on the land…but that’s another homily)…Jonah is walking through the streets of Ninevah yelling: “Forty days more and Nineveh shall be destroyed, “

He probably read too many obituaries. Or maybe he understood the message those obituaries teach: that life is too short and despite SSA.gov, we have no idea how short a time that will be.

Listen to Jesus at the beginning of his ministry, just before he calls his first disciples:

“This is the time of fulfillment.

The kingdom of God is at hand.

Repent, [today!] and believe in the gospel.”

That’s why Simon and Andrew abandoned their nets and followed him. It’s why James and John left their father in the boat and followed him. Because there is a terrible urgency about the Kingdom of God, a Kingdom which is not about yesterday or tomorrow, so much as about today.

Because in Jesus, the Kingdom of God is at hand. The same Jesus who tells us: 

today, find the man without a coat and give him yours;

today, look for the one who is sick and comfort her;

today, seek our the stranger and welcome him home;

today, find the one who hurt you and forgive her;

today, pray, repent, read the scriptures…. go to Church.

Today! For you may not have a tomorrow. 

Today!  For the Kingdom of God is at hand!

But it’s so easy to forget the urgency of life amidst all the stuff that keeps me so busy, until I’m walking through the cemetery and come across that old gravestone…it’s hard to read the letters, worn out by the elements and the acid rain, but it has been saying the same thing since 1792: 

Remember me as you pass by

As you are now so once was I

As I am now you soon will be

Prepare yourself to follow me.

Today is the time! The Kingdom of God is at hand!

Pope Francis and the Gospel of Life

Delivered to a Morning of Recollection on the Gospel of Life, 23 January 2021.

In these late pandemic days, as we all become obsessed with the efficacy of new vaccines for COVID-19, I am reminded of the origin story of the first vaccine, the first antibiotic, penicillin.

The popular version of the story, of course, involves the Scottish researcher Alexander Fleming. Seems Dr. Fleming, who was doing research on flu viruses, returned from a two week vacation to find a plate of staphylococcus culture which he had mistakenly left on his workbench. In his absence, something had begun to grow on the glass petri dish, something which appeared to have killed the staphylococcus and was soon to become the first antibiotic, which he named penicillin.

But then, as Paul Harvey used to say, there’s the rest of the story. 

After publishing his discovery, Fleming abandoned penicillin, judging that it was just too difficult to produce in mass quantities.  

It was not until ten years later that his research was picked up and completed by Howard Flory and Ernst Chain, who injected mice with the antibiotic, which cured scarlet fever, meningitis, diphtheria and bacterial pneumonia. Today it is “the most widely used antibiotic in the world.”¹

But what if Fleming had simply left penicillin on the shelf?  What if Flory and Chain had not brought their own insights to the problem? Well, the world would have been a very different place.

For first flush discoveries are by definition preliminary, foundational and incomplete.  No human being ever sees the full picture right away. And the best way to perfect something is for a second set of eyes to get involved.

That’s because each of us has our own unique history, with our individual strengths and weaknesses and our own way of looking at things. And no one of us have the last word…just the latest word, awaiting the refinement of future generations.

So it is with the Gospel of Life. The great work of Pope Saint John Paul II in writing his Encyclical Letter Evangelium Vitae would not have been possible without Pope Pius XII’s 1945 Gratissimam sane, the Second Vatican Council’s Gaudium et Spes, and Pope Saint Paul VI’s Encyclical letter Humanae Vitae. Each Pope’s proclamation of the Gospel, then, is built on the foundation of his predecessors, brick by brick.

For not only is each pope a different person, each is called to speak to a different world than his predecessor knew. And so it is with Pope Francis.

The context of life for JPII and Francis could not be more different. 

Karol Józef Wojtyła’s mother died when he was nine. A strong Polish patriot, he became an accomplished philosopher, a linguist and an actor. By the age of twenty had lost his mother, his father and his brother and was, in a real sense, all alone. His world view was formed by the rise of Nazism and after it communism. Reamarkably, he was ordained a Bishop at 38, made a Cardinal at 47 and become Pope at 58.

Jorge Mario Bergoglio, born 16 years after Wojtyła, could not have been more different,. There were five kids in his big Italian family. He grew up in Argentina and worked as a chemist, a janitor and a bouncer in a bar. At 21 he had half a lung removed and became the following year joined the Jesuits. Bishop at 56, a Cardinal at 65 and pope at 77, he reached each of those ministries at an age nearly twenty years older than his saintly predecessor.

Pope John Paul II was an academic who saw the world through the lens of the Second World War and Poland’s struggle with communism. Pope Francis is a practical Jesuit who spent most o his life working with the poor, living a polarized world intoxicated by digital data.

But the one thing that makes them both the same is their dedication to the Gospel of Life, seen albeit through the lens of their times.

Which is why I am equally amused and dismayed by a media which portrays Popes Francis and John Paul II as believing different things. In the words of Pope Francis, both are Catholic and both simply believe what the Church teaches.

Listen, for example to these words of Pope Francis, which could have as easily come from the pen of Pope Saint John Paul II; 

Our defense of the innocent unborn…needs to be clear, firm and passionate, for at stake is the dignity of a human life, which is always sacred and demands love for each person, regardless of his or her stage of development.²

Another example: Last November 22nd, on the occasion of the recent and tragic liberalization of Argentinean abortion laws, Pope Francis sent a handwritten note to a group of women working to defeat the law, asking in regard to abortion: “Is it fair to eliminate a human life to resolve a problem? Is it fair to hire a hitman to resolve a problem?”³

And again: 

I cannot stay silent over 30 to 40 million unborn lives cast aside every year through abortion. It is painful to behold how in many regions that see themselves as developed the practice is often urged because the children to come are disabled, or unplanned. Human life is never a burden. It demands we make space for it, not cast it off. ... Abortion is a grave injustice. It can never be a legitimate expression of autonomy and power. If our autonomy demands the death of another, it is none more than an iron cage.⁴

Like his Polish predecessor, Pope Francis’ disdain for abortion is closely connected to his love for the mothers this act so deeply wounds. Once, reflecting on how to care for a mother who has repented of aborting her child, the Holy Father recalled: 

“The problem is not in giving forgiveness, the problem is in accompanying a woman who has come to the realization she has had an abortion. …Because many times – indeed always – they have to meet with their child. And many times, when they cry and have this anguish, I counsel them: ‘Your child is in heaven, talk to him, sing him the lullaby that you did not sing, that you could not sing to him.’ And there is found a way of reconciliation for the mother with her child. With God it’s already there: it’s God’s forgiveness. God always forgives. But mercy also means that she needs to work this through.”⁵

From the child unjustly killed to the mother who mourns him, Pope Francis’ love for human life extends to all whose dignity is disrespected by an uncaring world. I return to his words: 

“Equally sacred…are the lives of the poor, those already born, the destitute, the abandoned and the underprivileged, the vulnerable infirm and elderly exposed to covert euthanasia, the victims of human trafficking, new forms of slavery, and every form of rejection.”⁶

But why, Pope Francis has asked repeatedly, why do we neglect such persons? Why do we fail to appreciate their inherent, and irreducible value?

It is, he suggests, because we fail to see them as persons. Rather, we mistake them them as things to be used, traded and disposed of when they become inconvenient or burdensome.

Such a throwaway culture, the Pope suggests fosters 

“a mentality in which everything has a price, everything can be bought, everything is negotiable…[and makes] room for only a select few, while it discards all those who are unproductive.”  Such a mentality reduces a person to a “a mere product in a marketplace which can be discarded as so much trash.”⁷

So how do we combat such a culture of death, a culture which reduces people to products to be bought and sold and disposed of for our own convenience?

The antidote, the Holy Father proposes, is what he calls a “Culture of Encounter.”

In such a culture, each and every person is treated with a deep and profound respect, with humility and love. It is not enough to lecture the world on what is right, the holy Father suggests, as if I were the perfect person and all they need to do is to be perfect like me!  It is not enough to just yell at the world: “Don’t do that….be perfect like me!”

No, I must see in each person I meet, and especially in those whom I find hard to love, the presence of Christ and I must love and respect and be humbled by their presence. In the poor and the prisoner, in the one who constantly contradicts me and who tries to cast me as their enemy…in them I must see Christ, in them I must, as the Pope prescribes “seek above all else to love them no matter how troublesome or inconvenient they may be.”⁸

For it is only by such a face-to-face encounter with others that we can dismantle the structures of disrespect and discord which so burden out world.

Such humble love and respect accomplishes so much more than enacting laws or donating money or publishing books. For it is only the physical presence of the other which changes us and, again to quote the Pope, “challenges us, with their pain and their pleas, with their joy which infects us in our close and continuous interaction.”⁹

From such personal encounters grows a love of all who are marginalized, monetized and forgotten. Such a personal encounter, again in the Holy Father’s words, leads us to hearts which ache for: 

“vulnerable children on the pavements of a large city, at the bottom of a boat overladen with immigrants; children who are not allowed to be born, who cry because no one satisfies their hunger with no toys in their hands, but weapons, victims of war, abortion and poverty.”¹⁰

Thus, the Holy Father calls us to begin to live the Gospel of Life by extinguishing hatred and violence in our own hearts, before we seek to cure the hearts of others. Listen to what he says about the landscape of cyberspace: 

“Even Christians can be caught up in networks of verbal violence through the internet and the various forums of digital communication. Even in Catholic media, limits can be overstepped ... and all ethical standards and respect for the good name of others can be abandoned…Here we see how the unguarded tongue, set on fire by hell, sets all things ablaze.”¹¹

The disciple of the Gospel of life, then, must be dedicated to a “consistent ethic of life,” and must also be a disciple of a Gospel of Reconciliation, which seeks to evangelize not by force, but by love, calling us to “confront every form of polarization which would divide…”¹²

This is how Pope Francis, like Pope Saint John Paul II before him, proclaims the Gospel of Life from his own experience and to his own world, teaching us that along with the need for just nations, just laws and just societies, freed from the corruption of using others, along with promoting a common recognition of the dignity of each human person from conception to natural death, we must strive to recognize the infinite dignity of the human person standing right in front of me, the one whom God has put into my life.

Such a Gospel of Life is not primarily political, although it is rightly committed to political ends. Nor is it primarily theoretical, although it is grounded in a philosophical and theological system.

Rather, as Pope Francis teaches us, the Gospel of Life is profoundly personal and it calls us to love like Jesus. For it is only with the language of love that the Gospel can be proclaimed and understood.

Allow me to conclude with some of the most beautiful words our Holy Father ever spoke in this regard.

“Love for the other cannot be reserved for exceptional moments, but must be constant in our lives. That is why we are called, for example, to safeguard the elderly like a precious treasure and with love even if they cause economic difficulties and inconveniences, but we must protect them. This is why we must give all the assistance possible to the sick, even in the final stages of their lives. This is why unborn children are always to be welcomed; this is why, ultimately, life is always to be protected and loved, from conception to its natural end. And this is love.”¹³

_______

1 - https://www.healio.com/news/endocrinology/20120325/penicillin-an-accidental-discovery-changed-the-course-of-medicine

2 - Pope Francis, Gaudete et Exultate, no. 101.

3 - Pope Francis, 22 November 2020.

4 - Pope Francis, Let Us Dream, page 115. November 28, 2020.

5 - Pope Francis. 27 January 2019.

6 - Pope Francis, Gaudete et Exultate, no. 101.

7 - Pope Francis, July 13, 2015.

8 - Pope Francis, October 20, 2017.

9 - Pope Francis, Evangelium Gaudium, no. 88.

10 - Pope Francis, 29 March, 2019.

11 - Pope Francis, 18 April 2019.

12 - Pope Francis to U.S. Congress, September 25, 2015.

13 - Pope Francis, 6 May 2018.

Following a light in the darkness

I’ve never been more terrified.  Every three year old knows how I felt…pulling the covers up to my neck in hopes that the witch and the monster I could hear in the closet were going to carry me away or eat me or make me scream.  And while they always went away in the morning, when the light came on, in the dark they always had the advantage.

Like when I was young priest, standing by the bed of the old man who was not going gently into that good night.  Actually, he was cursing and swearing at everything with a vehemence as scary and as loud, as it was desperate.  And I stood petrified, as I stared in the face of pure darkness and trembled before shouts of renunciation, professions of faithlessness, and an abject rejection of God.  It had never seemed so dark.

Except when I met the guy whose wife asked him for a divorce and told him she didn’t love him anymore.  He tried to reason that it was their son’s addiction, or their daughter’s unwed pregnancy, but he knew the darkness that was destroying their marriage was somehow leaking out of his own heart.  He’d stopped praying a long time ago and only went to Church when there were lilies or poinsettias.  He’d thought he plotted his own path for so long, but now he was lost in the dark, the dark that was in front and behind and beneath and all around him.  Lost in the dark.

Like a magus (singular of magi), wandering over hill and dale with all those camels and gifts, lost in the middle of the night.  All six of them: Gaspar, Melchior, Balthazar, the guy with the broken marriage, the young priest and the kid with the closet…all wandering through the dark night of the soul, looking for the star that rises in the East, for the morning star of our salvation and the refulgence of the Father’s glory.

Their journey to the manger in Bethlehem was what our beloved Pope emeritus called the “beginning of a great procession which winds throughout history.”¹

 It is our procession, through all the dark nights of our lives: a never ending struggle between the dark deceptions of Satan, with all his pomps and phantasms and the blinding love of God who rises in the East with healing in his wings.

So, listen to me, every little kid afraid of the dark: you never have to be afraid, ever again!  For the Baby Jesus, who was born for you in the manger has destroyed all the monsters and witches and banished the darkness in which they hid.  Never again need you be afraid of the dark, for it is ever but a prelude to the coming of his light and the fullness of his glory.

Listen to me, every old man on the brink of death: you never have to be afraid ever again!  For he who was born in a manger in the shadow of a cross upon which he offered his last breath for your salvation, in his dying has destroyed all death. And he has promised that those who eat his Body and drink his Blood will never really die at all, but will rise with him to eternal life.

And listen to me, you who are so lost in the dark that you cannot find your way, I say: you never have to be afraid, ever again!  Follow the Magi in this great procession of humanity to Jesus Christ, to the God who was born in a stable, who died on the Cross and who, having risen from the dead, remains with us always, until the consummation of the world.”²  Follow him and him alone and you will know the peace the world cannot give, until you come to love in perfect light with him who the light for ever.

“Arise, shine; for your light has come, 

and the glory of the Lord 

has risen upon you.”³

_________________________________________

1 - Pope Benedict XVI, Epiphany Homily, 2013.

2 - Pope Benedict XVI, Epiphany Homily, 2012; cf. Mt 28:20.

3 - Isaiah 60:1.

Born in a Manger...

To each and every one of you, on behalf of Bishop McManus, Father Diego and myself, I wish a joyful and grace-filled Christmas. I am delighted you managed to negotiate your way through the reservation system and find your way to a seat in this glorious cathedral, all decked out for Christmas.

Including our manger scene, which has been cleaned, repaired and repainted, and I am deeply grateful to Kristine and Mary for their hard work, which you may have read about in the Catholic Free Press a few weeks ago. It really does look beautiful.  Almost as beautiful as that night in Bethlehem.

That night when a young virgin on the back of a donkey was led by her aging husband to Bethlehem, so he could sign up for the Roman census. And, as you just heard, they could not find a place to stay, so they ended up in a manger.

Manger is a funny kind of word, for it exists only in the Gospel. It means literally a feed box, as a contemporary translation of Saint Luke reminds us: “she had her first baby and laid him in a feed box because there was no room for them in the place where travelers stayed.”

Being born in a manger was probably dirty and smelly and far from as comfortable as a bed. Plus it was on the outskirts of the most out of the way town in Galilee, at a time when mothers and their children frequently died during childbirth, even in the most hygienic of settings (which this stable was not).

Galilee in the time of Jesus was a place of sickness and disease, trying desperatelyto recover from an epidemic of tuberculosis.

So why of all the times and all the places in the long history of the world, did God choose a stinking animal stable in a disease infested backwater as the birthplace of his Son?

And why of all the times and places in the long history of the world, does God choose this time in this Cathedral, in a pandemic infested in world, so confused and afraid, so sinful and sorrowful, so dark and so cold?

And therein is the mystery of this night. For he came because he cherishes us, in all our stinkiness and disease infested littleness. He came because he loves us not in our brilliance or our sanctity, our accomplishments or our power, but in our brokenness, in our littleness, in our trembling in the face of pandemic sickness, in our first fear of losing those we love, in our confusion and uncertainty, in our weakness and in our pain. He loves us.

And on this night that weak little child in the crib takes up our littleness, our brokenness and our fears and carries them to the Cross, where he joins them to his own flesh and offers them up in a pure sacrifice of love

As the prayer says tonight: “he humbled himself to share in our humanity,

that we may share in his divinity.”

He came to feel in his own heart the same betrayals which have so many times broken yours,

He came to tremble in the face of death, the way you have by the grave or the ICU,

He came to know the humiliation of falling down just like you,

He came to weep the same tears that streamed down your cheeks,

He came to bleed with the same blood that flows through your veins,

For he with human hands, thought with a human mind, acted with a human will and loved with a human heart, just like yours.

And he did so not with “the splendor of a sovereign who dominates the world with his power, but with the humility of a child.”

Born of the Virgin Mary, he was made one of us in all things except sin.

For, in the words of a great mystic:

“He who was invulnerable asked to…feel cold and heat, hunger and thirst, weakness and pain.

He who…made all things asked to be poor…

He who was entirely sufficient to himself, asked…for a heart that might be broken.”

And therein lies the definition of love and the definition of this night: that it is not in our greatness or our power or our successes that we find the meaning of life. But in being little, obedient and loving…

Like the baby in the crib and the man on the Cross.

O come, let us adore him!

Mary, the Dwelling Place of God

 My homily for the Fourth Sunday in Advent.

David loved the Lord, more than anything else. Despite his sins, despite his wandering eye, he loved the Lord with his whole heart and soul and mind and life.

And so, he wanted to build the most worthy house for God to live in. A house where people could come and visit him, listen to the Lord and adore him.

So too, the Angel Gabriel was sent by God to find a worthy dwelling place for the Lord, the Christ, the Emmanuel, God-with-us.

And the Angel, an ancient story goes, searched the earth for a worthy place for the Son of God to live in. He considered a magnificent Temple of Gold, bedecked with fine jewels and built atop ten thousand marble steps, as from its gates four rivers flowed, abundant with life. Sure this would be a worthy dwelling place for the Son of God, he thought. But it was not worthy enough.

And so the Angel flew to the peak of the highest mountain on earth, where winds blew the snows to even greater heights, and upon which the sun glistened and danced. Nowhere was the sky more blue or the heights more breath-taking. Perhaps here, the Angel thought, we could build the temple with jewels and marbles and rivers, and this might become a worthy dwelling place for the Son of God. But it was not quite worthy.

So Gabriel looked up at the heavens, where the stars twinkled and shone against a cold night sky with an unimaginable beauty, where God had so woven the distant stars together that they seemed to embrace the earth with a transcendent power all their own. Here, at last, he declared is a worthy dwelling to enthrone the Son of the living God. But it was not worthy.

Discouraged, the old story goes, the poor angel returned to heaven and begged the most high God to show him a worthy dwelling place upon the earth for his co-eternal Son.

And so it happened, that the Angel Gabriel was “sent from God

to a town of Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man named Joseph, of the house of David, and the virgin’s name was Mary.”

For she, in her littleness, of all the great palaces and places upon the earth, was the only one worthy to embrace the Son of the Most High God as the fruit of her womb. This confused and frightened little girl, was alone full of grace. This handmaid of the Lord, who surrendered all to the will of God. She alone was worthy, and she alone was “a fit dwelling place” for the Son of God.

Which is why we call Mary “the Ark of the Covenant,” for just as in the former dispensation God and his commandments dwelled in an Ark of acacia wood and gold, so, quite literally, the Christ, the Son of the Living God lived in the Blessed Virgin’s womb, as her flesh was quite literally joined with his. And herein lies the pre-eminent reason why we call her blessed among women, for no other woman will ever experience this kind of communion in the flesh with God.

And just as when the first Ark of the Covenant was finished the the Shekinah, the Glory of God came down upon it and it became the dwelling place of God, so (you just heard) when the Holy Spirit come down upon the Blessed Virgin, Jesus came to live in her womb and she became the living shrine of the Word of God, the Ark of the New and Eternal Covenant. 

This is why Saint Athanasius called the Blessed Virgin Mary “greater than any other greatness.” He prays: “You are greater than them all O, [Ark of the] Covenant, clothed with purity instead of gold! You are the ark in which is found the golden vessel containing the true manna, that is, the flesh in which divinity resides,”

All of which is echoed in the Catechism: “Mary, in whom the Lord himself has just made his dwelling, is the daughter of Zion…the Ark of the Covenant, the place where the glory of the Lord dwells. She is ‘the dwelling of God . . . with men.’”

And not only is she the Ark of the Covenant, but she is the Gate of Heaven, as well: the door through which the Son of God chose to enter the world. For, as Saint John Henry Newman tells us, “it was through her that our Lord passed from heaven to earth.”

And this door is a two way street, for just as through her Jesus took flesh and entered our world, so too she is the porta caeli, the door through which we enter heaven. As St. Bonaventure tells us that “Mary is called gate of heaven because no one can enter that blessed kingdom without passing through her.” 

Mary is the porta caeli by her example, for no one can get to heaven without imitating her example of “fiat,” of total submission to God’s will. For, in the words of the Council Fathers, as she is “the image and beginning of the Church…so too does she shine forth on earth until the day of the Lord shall come as a sure sign of hope and solace to the people of God during their journey on Earth.”

Finally, Mary is our our most powerful intercessor with her Son, which is why we so often ask her to “pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.” So, like the Magi, let us go to this beautiful lady who holds in her arms the one who is our hope and salvation. And let us entrust ourselves to her intercession, her example and her care. Let us pray this Advent, to her in whose womb Christ willed to be formed for nine months, begging her to teach us, how he might be formed in us, as well.

Waiting in Joyful Hope (III Advent)

 

Simeon, by Diana Orpen,
Meditations with a Pencil (1946).

Expectantes in beatam spem. 

“Waiting in joyful hope.”

It’s part of an ancient prayer which the priest prays at every Mass. It’s proper name is the embolism, and it’s an expansion upon the last line of the Lord’s Prayer: “deliver us from evil.”

In it (you’ve heard it a hundred times) we ask God to deliver us from evil, grant us peace in our days and deliver us from all distress as we await the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ in joyful hope. 

What does that mean? Waiting in joyful hope?

On the one extreme is the fool, who waits when he doesn’t expect anyone to arrive. But on the other extreme is the one who waits in sure and certain hope, with bated breath, with a quickening heart and with joy!

Like Anna. Saint Luke calls her a prophet…but a prophet with a backstory. Seems she has married for seven years when her husband died and ever since then, she’s been wandering around the Temple, day and night, worshipping God with fasting and prayer” Oh, and one last detail: she’s now 84 years old…so she’s been wandering around the temple for fifty years, day and night, waiting for God to come.

Lotsa times, we’re a lot like Anna. Having lost what we loved after too short a time, disappointed by what life had to offer. And in our disappointment we turn to pleasure or power or internet fantasies to fill up our emptiness. But not so Anna! After she buried the love of her life, she went back to Church, where in the cold stillness of the Temple, she kept looking for God behind the shadows, waiting for him to come. She never stopped hoping, and her hope was fulfilled.

Not far from Anna stood Simeon, another senior citizen “waiting for the consolation of Israel”  Simeon is a curious name, it’s a Hebrew word with slavic roots, which means quite literally God is listening. As he was. God was listening and Simeon was waiting. A really good match.

And when he finally gets to hold the Christ child in his arms, Simeon sings a Canticle, which is the last song sung by every priest before he goes to sleep. It’s called the Nunc Dimittis and its the song you sing at the end of the waiting:

Nunc, 

Now, 

dimittis servum tuum, Domine, 

Let you your servant go in peace, Lord

secundum verbum tuum in pace:

In peace, according to your word.

And we’re kinda like Simeon too. Simeon, who was longing for rest, perhaps even eternal rest in the arms of the God he knew was listening. We don’t know what made Simeon’s arms weary and his heart ache. We don’t know why he longed to rest, but we do know he was weary, just like us.

Us, the children of pandemic, often the sons of disappointment and the daughters of discouragement. God knows how tired we get sometimes and how much we long to rest. And how in fitful sleep we wait for him to bring relief.

Simeon waited, just like Anna. And then God came. And in that nunc, in that now, gave him rest. As Simeon always knew he would.

Perhaps in his waiting, Simeon would pray David’s ancient Psalm:

I believe I shall see the LORD’s goodness

in the land of the living.

Wait for the LORD, take courage;

be stouthearted, wait for the Lord!

The same song sung in the voice of the Baptist in the desert: Wait! He is coming! The one of whom Isaiah prophesied: the one who heals the broken hearts, frees prisoners, wraps us in a mantle of justice and makes joy spring up like a garden spring.

And so we wait, not just for the Lord who will come at the end of time, but for the God who will come in our next breath and in every breath of our lives. The God who makes our lives a continuous Advent of expectation, a sure and certain expectation that he cares.

A joyful hope born of the assurance that he knows my name and that his love for me is greater than I will ever know. It is the love of a Father, who never stops thinking about me, caring for me, longing for me, desiring to come, to be with me, to stay with me.

For his love is a gratuitous love, of which Carlo Carretto once wrote:

“[God’s] coming is bound to his promise, not to our works or virtue. We have not earned this meeting with God because we have served him faithfully…, or because we have heaped up such a pile of virtue as to shine before Heaven. God is thrust onward by his love, not attracted by our beauty. He comes in moments when we have done everything wrong, when we have done nothing…when we have sinned.”

Those words, perhaps more than any others, sustained my faith as a young seminarian…for they assured me that God’s love for me is omnipotent and insatiable, even when I forget him and even when I run away.

So, as we remember his coming in a manger and look forward to his coming at the end of time, let us not neglect his coming in our hearts. For in between yesterday and tomorrow is the today of his love, the nunc of Simeon and Anna and even of you and me.

Comfort and joy...

 A Homily for the Second Sunday in Advent.

One of my favorite English carols is also the oldest, dating from the sixteenth century and beginning with the words: “God rest ye merry gentlemen.” Even by the time that Dickens quoted it in A Christmas Carol, however, the meaning of that first sentence had changed (which is why he changed it to God bless you merry gentlemen), To make a long story short, rest meant make in the sixteenth century and merry meant strong, so the first line really meant God make you strong, Gentlemen. Make you strong as he has made himself weak…God making himself a weak little baby that we might be strong…that we might know, as the refrain reminds us, “comfort and joy.”

Comfort. I don’t know about you, but I could certainly do with a great big serving of comfort right about now. ‘cause I’m really really tired of this pandemic. It’s been almost ten months and people are still dying, and I’m feeling kinda fed up. Fed up with distancing myself from people, especially the people like you, whom I love. I don’t think I’ve been hugged in since last Lent!

I spend all my time backing away from people, being afraid I will get sick and cough and be intubated and die.  And worse, that I’ll make you sick and cough and be intubated and die. And I have just about had it. And I think you have too.

Sounds like we are badly in need of some comfort and joy. Which is just what Isaiah promises: “Comfort,” he says…give comfort to my people…speak tenderly to them…” But what is this comfort? How are we comforted? At the end of the Book of the Prophet Isaiah we get a clue: “As one whom his mother comforts, so I will comfort you…”

So God comforts us is as a mother comforts her child. And is anyone better at comforting than a mother?

I remember seeing a young couple a while back in Price Chopper with their two year old child, who was clearly as tired as I was, but was not handling it quite so well.  In fact he was weeping and moaning and swinging his arms in every direction, just trying to hit something to make those feelings go away. And as he threw his little hissie fit, his father (God bless him) tried first to reason with him (it didn't work) and then to get him to calm down with a soothing voice and a hug (which looked more like a restraining order) the poor guy did everything he could…all to no avail. Until the mother knelt down and spoke in a still, soft, tender voice and smiled at him with her arms open and he ran to her and sobbed softly on her shoulder, comforted and at peace.

Mothers are really good at comforting, and so is God: “As one whom his mother comforts, so I will comfort you…”

St Therese of Lisieux understood that, when she wrote of this passage: “Never did words more tender and more melodious come to give joy to my soul. The elevator which must raise me to heaven is your arms, O Jesus! And for this I had no need to grow up, but rather I had to remain little and become little more and more.” 

God is waiting to comfort us as his beloved little child.  And that’s all we have to be…his little child, if we will just give him a chance.  As an oft quoted theologian once wrote: “Are you lonely?  Here is a chance to creep into the motherly arms of God and find peace.  Are you sorrowful?  You may come and put your head upon his breast and weep there and find infinite comfort.”

The close comfort of a child cradled in her mother’s arms. Close, protected and real. 

It is the comfort for which the Baptist prepares, making straight the way for Emmanuel, the God who is with us, the God who “did not deem equality with God something to be grasped at but took the form of a slave, being born in the likeness of men.” The God who lets go of his infinite power, becoming a weak little baby and a man nailed to a cross, just so he can be close to us and teach us how to love.

And therein is the definition of “comfort and joy,” and why Saint Paul calls God “the Father of mercies and the God of all comfort…”

Indeed, the the word Saint Paul uses for comfort is paraclesis, which means literally calling to be close to.  He is the God who who wants to be close to us, to love us like a good shepherd loves his sheep, who (back to Isaiah) “feeds his flock; gathers the lambs in his arms, carrying them in his bosom, and leading the littles ones with care.”

This is the God who is as close to us as the beating of our heart, of which Saint John writes: “…they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying out nor pain anymore…”

This is Jesus, the Emmanuel, God with us, of whom we will pray in a few minutes: “come…to our rescue with the protection of your mercy.”

And he will come, for he has promised and he is a God who keeps his promises. And the comfort he brings is not just for the moment, like most of our troubles. No! His comfort is everlasting, inexhaustible, immutable and indestructible.

And all we need do is to accept it, like a frustrated little kid, stamping his feet and crying. All we need to do is to run into his arms, to tell him what makes us tremble and cry and stamp our feet…and he will sweep us up in his arms and he will give us peace…the peace the world cannot give.

That’s all we have to do. But we spend most of our time clinging to our fears and embracing what Pope Francis calls a spiritual pessimism, refusing to believe how close God wants to be to us in Jesus, how close in Holy Communion, how close in his Word, how close in his sufferings upon the cross, to which he invites us to join all our brokenness and pain…all the fears and the exhaustion of our tired little lives.

But it’s Advent, and to quote Pope Francis again, this is the time to prepare ourselves for the coming of comfort and joy, “the peace of God’s presence…[by opening] our hearts and allowing ourselves to be consoled” and to know his peace.