Take your time to pray this final guided contemplation. Listen and follow God's Spirit that moves within you. May your time with the Lord remind you that God desires your happiness.
These slides were originally designed for the local Jesuit website.
Many of us desire this peace. Sadly, it is elusive in today’s world. Senseless suffering and pain and unnecessary deaths scar daily life. Droughts and earthquakes, wars and terrorist attacks, economic woes and job losses mean an uncertain future for so many. All these dim the brightness we long for. At home and at work, disagreements and misunderstandings, petty jealousies and a fearful rejection of our love and care further diminish this light.
Within ourselves, anxiety and disquiet reign as we struggle to reconcile the tensions in life. At these times, we feel we are being tossed about in life’s turbulent waters. There is no peace. It seems impossible to have.
Yet the Advent readings and hymns assure us, as they invite us to remember, the One who can give us true peace, Jesus.
Jesus is God’s gift of peace. Indeed, this grown up babe will say to us, “Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest.” And what is this rest but the peace that our wearied, searching hearts will find in the Lord, as St Augustine reminds us.
On Christmas morn, we will find ourselves drawn to the manger. Many reasons move us to it. Perhaps, one is our yearning to look upon the serene face of Jesus, Prince of Peace, and in this moment, experience and know true peace.
And if we smile at Jesus then, we smile because we have a sense that all the contraries of human life find their reconciliation in him. They become one, and, in so doing, they express the fullness of humanity: the finite and infinite, the human and the divine, the lowly and the almighty.
I’d like to believe the shepherds smiled at Jesus too because they saw the invisible made visible. For there, in the manger, the almighty God laid, born one like us, fragile, small and innocent. What is this scene but the poverty of human existence transfigured for us to celebrate the richness of human life Jesus shows us it can be as God’s children.
Isaiah spoke of a people in darkness long pinning for God. They saw it in the radiance of the Christ Child. There was no longer fear and uncertainty; they found joy and assurance. Indeed, the impossible became possible that Christmas morn – for God was not apart but God is with us, now and always. Simeon celebrated this truth at the presentation of Jesus in the Temple. His was a joyful confession of one human heart to which Peace came and wherein it rested always.
Let us pray to have the eyes of Simeon this Christmas: may we recognize the Christ Child who is in our midst and who brings peace, peace on earth for you and me, and all people of goodwill.
Limited as it is, their hope points us to the real hope Advent directs our gazes to: God’s gift of himself. Our Advent readings and liturgies invite us to remember and celebrate this hope made real in the friendships Jesus had with friend and foe centuries ago, and, more so, with us today.
At the heart of hope a friend gives another is life. God saw his people in darkness because of sin. Filled with compassion, he gave them Jesus, his only Son, to redeem and bring them life, life to the full. The hope humankind sought again and again in an invisible God became real and alive in the face of Jesus.
We experience this truth each Christmas morn: when we see the gurgling, smiling Baby Jesus in the manger in church, we see the laughing, joyful God whose deepest desire is our salvation and happiness. God smiles at us at Christmas. How can we not smile back?
Indeed, this coming Christmas, we will join the shepherds and kings to smile at Jesus too. We will smile because in this babe we will find again the assurance that our hope in God is not unfounded. It is true: God is with us.
In the midst of our present economic pain and anxiety, and a continuing fear of terrorists who maim and kill, we can lift up our gazes this Christmas Day and find real hope in Jesus, the face of God. We can do this because God reaches out to us in friendship again, we who repeatedly live less than Christian lives. Because of love, he bears us hope anew. And this friendship is alive in the daily Christmases of everyday living when the hope Jesus is comes to birth in us, repeatedly through our friends, and the events and circumstances we meet in, laugh at, quarrel over and reconcile because of.
This Advent, then, let us savour God’s friendship by relishing more wholeheartedly Jesus, our true hope.
These slides were orginally designed for the local Jesuit website.
Reflecting on their clasped hands, I realized how touch is not often our usual manner of communicating with one another. In everyday life, we are far more comfortable with words than touch. Indeed, it is safer to express our innermost feelings and thoughts with words. A touch, on the other hand, can be dangerous: it says so much more. Indeed, it does not lie; often, it speaks the truth of our deepest selves.
Looking back on my childhood, I see how true this is in my mother’s embrace and my father’s kisses: these expressed their immeasurable love for my siblings and me. My nephew Glenn reminds me of this truth. These days when I visit him, he says “hello” and “I love you” with a hug that articulates what he cannot yet utter at eighteen months. Indeed, touch is our first language of knowing and showing love.
Touch is what we yearn for from another whom we love, be it family or friend, because it makes their love and concern, their friendship truly felt in our lives. Their touch assures, as it enlivens. Yet, this that we seek is sadly what we are often unable to give to another freely and comfortably in everyday life. How often do we give a family member a hug at the end of the day? Are we honestly comfortable with patting a friend heartily on the back to encourage and affirm? Isn’t it much easier to say “sorry” than to stretch out our hand to our enemy in reconciliation ?
To our struggles of expressing ourselves truthfully through touch, Jesus’ response is to show us otherwise. For Jesus, touch is fundamentally a human, if not spiritual way, of being with and for another. Touch was so much part of Jesus’ way of being friend and companion, teacher and master. And through his touch—those acts of healing, comforting, accompanying others he did—Jesus made real God’s great love for many.
We can make ourselves more human, and the truth of God’s love more real in our lives and those we love and work with, by learning from Jesus. In welcoming, embracing and blessing children, Jesus shows us a meaningful way of being human by ministering to another’s deepest longing to be loved. To touch another is to make God’s love real through deeds rather than words. Francis of Assisi, Mother Teresa, our fathers and mothers did this well when they reached out and touched another. Like them, we do this every now and then too. In these moments, God’s love is far more manifest than any homily, pronoucement or song can convey.
Perhaps, what humankind truly desires most then in a touch is not satisfaction of a physical want or gratification of an emotional longing. No, what each person seeks deep within himself is an experience of God’s love through another’s touch. And we yearn for this for no other reason than that we were made to be in touch with God.
This week, we might want to reflect on this question, “Can I begin to be more the person I am called to be by reaching out and touching someone who thirsts for God's love?”
photo: three girls holding hands by ray moller
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