1. Year B / Feast of the Holy Family
    Readings: Genesis 15.1-6, 21.1-3 / Responsorial Psalm 104.1-6, 8-9 (R/v 7a, 8a) / Hebrews 11.8, 11-12, 17-19/ Luke 2.22-40


    It’s a Wonderful Life is my favourite Christmas film. 

    It's a story about George Bailey. He gives up his dreams to help others own affordable housing. His plans are sabotaged by an enemy; his housing project faces bankruptcy and he faces imprisonment. In desperation, George attempts suicide. But his guardian angel, Clarence, saves George by showing him how much good he has done for others, and how different his town would be had he not been born. Seeing this, George chooses life and returns home to family and friends. Clarence leaves him with this parting advice: "Remember no man is a failure who has friends.” And I will add, no one is a failure when she has family.

    Today’s celebration of the Holy Family invites us to reflect on why we need to be part of a family. 

    Perhaps like me, you might have come to this feast in the past, heard the readings and the homilies, and said, “We can never be like the Holy Family; we’re such an unholy family.” I think we say this because we’ve all experienced the tensions of family life: those messy, difficult, painful and unChristian experiences.

    The good news is that the Church does not expect our families to be as perfect as the Holy Family to celebrate today’s feast. 

    Our families are probably like George’s family in It’s a Wonderful Life. We might have some frustration, resentment, anger and depression towards our family, as George had towards his. Like him, we might sometimes feel trapped, manipulated and offended by what our immediate and extended family say and do. We might also be disappointed and ashamed that we have divorced, remarried and gay family members or family who have criminal records and skeletons in their closets; and we struggle as a Christian family to love them because we don’t know how to do this well enough.

    But isn’t it true that our families also make a positive difference in our lives? Don’t our family interactions, responsibilities, relationships give us joy, comfort and hope? Don’t they save us from sadness, loneliness and despair? Don’t they redeem us from the sin of selfishness and greed by drawing us into the grace of selflessness and generosity? And yes, don’t our love in and for our families—no matter the amount we give and receive—always bless us into life?

    I believe George achieves holiness at end of the film. It is his bonds and responsibilities as a family member that save him into holiness. They save him from self-centeredness by teaching him generosity towards others. They save him from death by helping him choose life. Yes, it is George’s family that schools him into holiness: they teach him to be more giving, more trusting, more thankful, more disposed towards life, even as he struggles with his daily duties as husband, father, family member and friend. 

    Don’t our families do the same for you and me? Don’t they school us to become more Christian in our attitudes and behaviors, in our words and deeds towards one another? Aren’t those disagreements, conflicts, discomforts with family really teachable moments for us to become more loving, more forgiving, more accepting, more caring, more family? 

    I’d like to suggest that family life is indeed the most important school to learn holiness and to grow up more Christian.

    Learning to grow in holiness is in fact what the Holy Family models for us. They are not holy because of the presence of the historical Jesus. They are holy because they strove in their family life to find God’s grace and to grow in God’s ways. This is why we have the families we do: to help us to grow into holiness. 

    From the angel’s announcement to Mary and then to Joseph, this couple lived amidst the tensions of life to follow God more faithfully. A pregnant and unmarried Mary, a still faithful Joseph, Jewish laws that questioned their union, puzzled kinsfolk: these made up the tensions they faced initially. But Mary and Joseph kept on walking, journeying, fleeing and trusting God. 

    Indeed, from the finding of Jesus in the temple to the finding of Jesus at the foot of the cross, from the flight into Egypt to his leaving home, this family struggled with the tensions of mystery, uncertainty and letting go as they followed and fulfilled God’s plan faithfully.

    For many of us, these tensions are evils to be resolved or overcome. But the Holy Family teaches us that these tensions are the very spaces for God’s grace to enter into our family lives, and to perfect us in holiness. 

    What we have to learn to do is to live in these tensions like the Holy Family did: by seeking God; by trusting God; by letting God lead. 

    I believe that Holy Family could live in the tensions of family life and still find God because they practiced obedience. We hear about obedience in today's readings, especially in our gospel story. Mary and Joseph obey the Law of Moses that Mary purifies herself after childbirth, that they present their first born to God, and that they thank God with sacrificial offerings. And Jesus’ obedience growing up found favor with God.

    Obedience is what allows God to fulfill God’s great and wonderful mystery of salvation in our lives. And it is writ large in the life of the Holy Family. Joseph obeyed the angel no matter what, and so obeyed God; and he obeyed the wisdom of his wife. Mary emptied herself for God at the word of the angel, and she obeyed the protective initiatives of her husband. 

    This mutual obedience of husband and wife, first to God and then to one another, is an image of the obedience that Jesus would give, first to His Father and then to His parents in Nazareth. Indeed, obedience to God and one another as it is practice in family is how Jesus, Mary and Joseph grow into a family filled with holiness.

    Perhaps, our present-day crisis in the family has to do with how we have forgotten, if not devalued, it as the graced place and source of our holiness in God.  Society often thinks of the family as an economic shelter or a baby-making machine or a restriction upon our freedom, peace and pleasure. As Christians, we must value the family otherwise. The family is a communion of persons God brings together to help us grow in holiness, and by this life of holiness, for us to enter into our salvation.

    Growing into holiness is indeed the Christian promise of God meeting and perfecting us in the tensions of family life. If this is what we celebrate in the life of the Holy Family, this morning, shouldn’t we learn to value our own families a lot more, not just today but always? After all, our family might just be the most wondrous life we’ll ever have with God and with one another. 



    (inspired by Kurt Engel)

    Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore
    Photo: from the Internet (www.tripology.com)



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  2. Year B / Christmas Day
    Readings: Isaiah 52.7-10 / Responsorial Psalm 98.1-6 (R/v 3c) / Hebrews 1.1-6 / John 1.1-18


    I can see her face still, after all these years. It is Sunday morning. We are on the 17th floor, in the psychiatric ward where I am training as a hospital chaplain. Outside, the downtown skyscrapers of New York City glistened in the sunlight. Inside, the Catholic patients are gathering for a Communion service I’m about to conduct. 

    She is twenty-six years old, an African-American, a veteran of the Iraq war. She is recovering from a failed suicide attempt. She had tried to end her life because of guilt: she had accidentally killed a 16 year old whom she mistook for an Iraqi insurgent. She comes up to me, her eyes tearing. In a voice pregnant with longing, she asks, “Where were you?” 

    Every time I remember her haunting question, I am reminded poignantly of another question we all struggle with from time to time: “Where are you, God?” “Where are you, God, in my pain and suffering?” “In our illnesses and deaths?” “When my expectations are unfulfilled and our love is unrequited?” “When our plans are laid to waste and my future looks bleak?” 

    Whether we cry out “Where are you, God?” or “How long, Lord, how long?” we do so thinking that God is absent, remote, distant, apart from us. Yet, we believe that God is “always and everywhere present.” And today, more than any other day, we celebrate that God is with us: “the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.” What then?

    Not for us anymore the “what ifs” of who God is, or what God does, or where God is. What the Word made flesh, in Jesus, offers as the correct answer to this question are these truths: God is here with us; that God is here for us; and God is here because God loves us. This is why the outstretched arms of the baby Jesus is God’s invitation to you and me to enter the embrace of Emmanuel, God-with-us.

    How can we do this? By surrendering ourselves to our God who is “always and everywhere present.” But our surrender must be as childlike, as God is childlike in coming to us in Jesus.

    The final stanza of John Shea’s poem, “Sharon’s Christmas Prayer,” gives us a glimpse of the form this childlike surrender ought to have. When asked who the newborn baby is, Sharon said, “God.” Then “she jumped in the air / whirled around, dove into the sofa /and buried her head under the cushion / which is the only proper response / to the Good News of the Incarnation” (The Hour of the Unexpected). Sharon’s delightful response is to throw herself in trusting abandonment into the Good News God is. 

    Isn’t this how the shepherds and the wise men in the Christmas narratives of Luke and Matthew come to Jesus too? Don’t they surrender themselves in confident submission to the joyful Good News that God is amongst us? 

    Like Sharon, the shepherds and the magi show us that there is no only other way to savor the wonder of Jesus, God’s gift, but to surrender. When God bids us come to God, be it through angels singing “peace on earth” or a bright star that leads all to Bethlehem, how can we not come?

    And so, surrendering ourselves we must, and we can. For as the poet, W. H. Auden explains “Because of God’s visitation in Jesus, we may no longer desire God as if He were lacking; our redemption is no longer a question of pursuit but of surrender to Him who is always and everywhere present” (For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio). 

    Yes, God has come and God continues to come, to answer our question “Where are you?” with the gentleness of Jesus’ gurgle; his is a little noisy din that resounds loudly as the Word of God breaking into our lives to console, accompany and uplift us, saint and sinner alike. 

    Perhaps, this is why we have come to worship the child Jesus today: he is God-with-us. We know the joyful song the angels sang and we recollect how the shepherds proclaimed God’s glory after visiting this child in the manger. And we know – no, we believe – that we too are called to come, to see and to go forth singing the same angel song and announcing the same shepherd testimony to the world.

    So, let us come to the Christmas Crib to look for Jesus who we must never lose sight of amidst life’s attractions and distractions. Finding him, let us kneel before Jesus who comes as our Saviour not just today but always. Then, let us go forth to announce this Good News.

    Only when we dare to do this will the world and we experience God’s immediacy and intimacy in each other’s words and actions. In another’s warm embrace in your disappointment. In the family’s thanksgiving for your kindness. In the forgiveness of others for mistakes made. In a faraway friend who emails to celebrate “Merry Christmas” this morning. In a mother’s delight for a child’s success. In hands clasped as a father passes on. In the first “I love you” a couple clumsily utters to each other. In the honest challenge to one’s vocation. In our care for one another as we journey through life and faith.

    These are our human ways of expressing why God became human: so that God can be with us. As we become more and more aware of these God moments, we should be more enlightened that in Jesus God’s embrace is wider, broader, and deeper than any sin committed, any evil done, any refusal of God made. 

    Surrendering ourselves with an “Amen” is the Christian way to better hear God’s answer that God has come to our question, “Where are you, God?” 

    But what if “Amen” is the very response God hopes to hear from us who come to Jesus today? Our “Amen” as the most appropriate human response to God who is asking us through the child Jesus, “Where are you?” “Where are you, Barney?” “Where are you, Audrey?” “Where are you, Therese and you, Philip?" "Where are you, and you, and you?” “Where are you, Adrian?”

    I can still remember this female veteran sitting with the others around an ordinary table that Sunday morning. I can see their expectant faces. The consecrated hosts rests in a ciborium on a hand towel that is laid out like a corporal. We pray the Our Father. 

    Then, all receive Holy Communion, including this young lady who has not had communion for the longest of time. She receives the Body of Christ, in the littleness of a host, once again. As it is placed into the cradle of her hands, she responds, “Amen.” And so it is: God has come, and God will be here, always. 



    Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore.
    artwork: Adoration of the Shepherds by Gerard van Honthorst

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  3. Year B / Advent / 4th Sunday
    Readings: 2 Samuel 7.1-5, 8b-12, 14a, 16 / Responsorial Psalm 89 (R/v 2a) / Romans 16.25-27 / Luke 1.26-38


    Many of us have been playing it on our iPods and car stereos this Advent. Some of us are probably singing it now and again. I know I have dreamt it for the past 5 years in Boston. What this is is the song “I’ll be home for Christmas.”

    Whether it is sung by Diana Krall or the Carpenters or Bing Crosby, “I’ll be home for Christmas” is more than a Christmas standard; it sings of a most deep-seated longing we all have: to be at home.

    A theme in today’s readings is “home,” in particular about God wanting to come to us and to be at home with us.

    Our 1st reading describes where for God home is. For David, the tent over God's ark is not a suitable home; God deserves a better and more permanent dwelling. But God politely turns down David’s offer not because it is unworthy but because God wants to freely choose where he will dwell in: with his people. “I will fix a place for my people, and it will endure in my presence,” God says in this reading. God’s announcement situates God’s people geographically in Israel. More importantly, it proclaims the truly good news that God’s people should live in no other place but in God’s space. 

    Our gospel reading about the Annunciation tells us how God comes to dwell with God’s people: by entering into our lives. Mary’s ‘yes’ is the doorway for God to enter human form and to take it on. Jesus is the human embodiment of God in our midst. This is how we come to know that our human form is where God wishes to dwell in.

    Why the human form?  Not because it is perfect for will decay and die. Not because it is holy for its condition is scared by original sin. Not because it is strong or rich for it is prone to frailty and weakness, to impoverishment and want. 

    But because it is poor. Not poor in the economic sense of lacking, but poor in that richer theological sense of hoping. Yes, our human form is poor because God has formed it to necessarily hope. And to hope is to do what God always does: to hope in us.

    God hopes for us to become like God. And, we hope in God to actualize God’s hope in us: that we become more divine by becoming a lot more human. That Jesus inhabited human form in all ways but sin, and showed us how to be fully human and so more divine, testifies to this. 

    Isn't this why God comes to dwell in human form? To show us in Jesus -- in him who inhabits our human form -- how to realize God's hope for our eternal happiness.  If you, like me, agree with this truth of who Jesus must be for all humankind, then, how can our human form to be intrinsically bad and sinful, as some in Church condemn it to be? In Jesus we see how our human form must be fundamentally good, good enough for it to be God’s choicest dwelling space to live in, so as to be one like us and one with us. 

    More importantly, God dwells in human form as Jesus, the one human being who does show us the way, the truth and life of how God loves us into our salvation. Yes, God comes amongst us by inhabiting no other space but our human form.

    In these final Advent days, the Church offers us readings that proclaim the immediacy of Jesus’ coming. As we read or hear them, I believe, we cannot help but acknowledge the need to make a place for Jesus, a place where hope can grow as he did in the virgin womb of Mary. 

    For the Trappist monks of Spencer in Massachusetts, this space is our very being. Here is where our hope in Jesus will grow. But it begins when each one of us honestly admits to the fear and helplessness we experience in our lives.  This is how we can open the creaky, low door of our imperfections to the Child Jesus to come into our lives and to mature in us for mission, just like Jesus did in Mary who bore him not only within her but to the world. 

    This is how “our fears and sorrow become a great open place to welcome him,” the monks point out. They add, “From this most unlikely of places—as smelly as the straw of a Bethlehem stall—from this of all places, a tiny hand will reach out toward us. God is crying a message that ‘we need not be afraid.’ We can be unafraid for we are dearly loved by a God who dares to become a little Child.” 

    In my opinion, God does this in the only way God must do as the hope our God is: by coming home to each one of us.

    "I will be home for Christmas." We are all familiar with this first line from the chorus of the song. It ends with these words: "you can count on me." 

    What if God is singing this whole line to you and me, gently and softly, with a love beyond all telling, in this early morning quiet to just say this: “yes, I will be coming home to you, and yes, you can count on me"? 

    How now shall you and I receive God’s homecoming in Jesus this Christmas day? 


    (with inputs from the Trappist monks at Spencer Monastery)

     Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore
    photo: april hoeller (christmasmagician.blogspot.com)


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  4. Year B / Advent / 3rd Sunday
    Readings: Isaiah 61.1-2a, 10-11/ Canticle from Luke 1.46-48,49-50, 53-54 (R/v Is 61.10b) / 1 Thessalonians 5.16-24 / John 1.6-8, 19-28


    It’s the morning of your posting to your secondary school. You wonder what’s in store for you: What will the new school be like? How will the teachers teach? Who will be my friends? Everything’s going to be different. You’re excited and anxious.

    With Mom and Dad, you head off early to school. So do the other new and eager Secondary 1 students. As you walk up the school’s driveway, morning light is peeling back the darkness of the night. Then, you see what you’d never expect to find in school: a Christmas tree, all-aglow with twinkling lights. Mom lets out a “wow”; Dad smiles; and you say to yourself, “It’s probably going to be just fine.” 

    We hope this is the experience our new students will have when they join us in St Joseph’s Institution. An 8-foot tall Christmas Tree, all awash with lights and trinkets, will indeed welcome them. And we do hope this will gladden them as they experience the joy of Christmas.

    Our generous benefactors have made this possible. Their gift of the tree speaks of the Christmas joy they cannot help but share with many, not hoard for themselves. I believe their joy is rooted in and inspired by the joy of God, a joy so movingly expressed by God’s prodigious sharing of divine love with us. Jesus is the name God has given to describe the goodness being shared.

    Sharing Jesus is God’s plan to fill our world with joy. But we cannot make this our true joy unless we let it be the kind of joy God wishes for us in Jesus. A joy that originates in another’s love for us. A joy that is alive, spontaneous, excessive, infectious. A joy that moves us to share it generously with others, especially the unhappy, the desolate, the despairing. 

    In Jesus, this joy is never self-seeking but truly self-giving. This is the joy God has and shares. And God wishes that we make this joy our own so that we can truly live in love with God and in selflessness for neighbor. 

    Any other kind of joy is selfish. When we decide what joy should be, when we determine how it should meet our expectations, and when we choose who deserves it, what we have is fake joy. It is superficial, wanting and short-lived. 

    In contrast, true joy surprises, transforms and gives life. True joy is ours when someone bestows it on us when we least expect it.  True joy comes alive in us when another draws it out of us to share, especially when we think we have nothing to share. True joy becomes life-giving for us when we realize that its origin and goal lies in another’s love for us. Such joy inevitably refocuses our gaze onto the love of God whose singular joy is to be with us.

    John the Baptist points us once again to the source of this kind of joy in today’s gospel reading. Jesus. Jesus is the light John came to testify to. 

    But what kind of light is Jesus? How does Jesus shed light on God’s goodness in our midst? Why is the light of Jesus joyful? Perhaps this story can give us an answer.
    A rabbi gathered his students just before dawn. He asked them to distinguish between day and night. As the first morning rays pierced the fading formless darkness in the distant east, a cock crowed. “Ah! Rabbi,” said one, “When the cock crows day has come and night is spent.” The rabbi shook his head.  
    “Rabbi, is it when we can see and name the animals in the dawning light?” asked another tentatively. “It is not,” replied the rabbi. “Then, it must be when we can look out to the brightening horizon and see much more than the faint illumination our lamps give off in the dark.” The rabbi raised his head, looked steely but lovingly into the faces of each bewildering disciple.  
    Then, he said: “There is light when we can look at each person we meet and recognize in the distinctive face of a brother and a sister, one like you and me, the image of God. Now, that is light.”
    Light that enables us to look at another’s face and to behold in our shared human visage the promised divinity we share in as God’s children. This is the kind of the light Jesus brings into our world.

    In Jesus’ light you and I can see the divine lines etched into our human faces more clearly: this is how we come to know that we are truly God’s beloved. More beautifully, I'd like to imagine Jesus’ light flooding God’s memory with the truth of who we must always be to God: God’s own, never to be forgotten but to be lovingly saved into eternity. 

    This is our joy in Jesus. We have every right to celebrate this joy because it is already ours with Jesus’ birth. And we have every right to hope in this joy because Jesus will come into each new day of our lives. 

    The 3rd Sunday of Advent invites us to remember, to celebrate and to believe in this joy we have in Jesus. It also calls us to let this joy resound in each of us so that we can proclaim it to one and another and to all. This is how we can help each other to better keep our gaze firmly on the reason for the season, as we busy ourselves with Christmas shopping, cooking and merrymaking in these last weeks of Advent. 

    “The joy of the gospel, the joy of the good news,” Pope Francis observes, “fills the hearts and lives of all who encounter Jesus” (Evangelii Gaudium). Jesus encounters us daily; and isn't this good enough reason for us to herald the joy of Christmas?

    The authors of our readings also speak about this joy in their writings. Isaiah rejoices in a Messiah who will make justice and praise spring up before all the nations. The Psalmist sings joyfully of the great things the Lord has done for him in God’s mercy. And Paul instructs us to rejoice always because God’s faithfulness in Jesus will accomplish the goodness God wishes for us not just in heaven but on earth too.

    What about us? What about God’s goodness will we announce in these remaining Advent days? How can we be like the authors of our readings and the benefactors of the tree when we do this?

    I believe we can: we all have something joyful to proclaim about God and God’s actions in our lives. Whether this be like the many small, twinkling lights on a Christmas tree or the radiant light of a new dawn, words and actions of care and consolation, of forgiveness and reconciliation, of sharing love or giving life that we have experienced will reflect something of the light of Jesus in whom we better see God’s love in one  another.

    Then this announcement of joy we make might possibly be a far better gift to someone we love or we have hurt or we know needs some happiness than an expensive present purchased from Robinsons, Metro or Amazon. Sharing the joy of God’s presence this Christmas might indeed be good enough for him or her or them all to say, “This feels like Jesus has come, and I’m going to be just fine!” Let us not delay then in sharing this joy; after all, the Lord himself never delays in coming to us!



    Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore
    photo: april hoeller (christmasmagician.blogspot.com)

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  5. Year B / Advent / 2nd Sunday
    Readings: Isaiah 40.1-5, 9-11/ Psalm 85 (R/v 8) / 2 Peter 3.8-14 / Mark 1.1-8


    It's Wednesday, August 4. It's unbearably hot in Pesaro, Italy. Michele Ferris' phone rings. He answers it. He hears a voice saying, "Ciao, Michele, è Papà Francesco." At first he thinks it is a joke, then, he begins to realize it's for real. Pope Francis has called to console Michele after reading his letter about the painful loss of his brother criminals gunned down.

    This is how Elisabetta Piqué ends her biography of Francis: with a description of loving care. This image of Francis lovingly caring for Michele that I read about this past week remained with me as I prayed the readings of this 2nd Sunday of Advent; they too speak of loving care—of God’s loving care for humankind.

    This reality of God’s immense love that cares for us into our salvation is the base note in today's readings. To hear it is to remember that God so loved the world that he gave us his only son (John 3.16). Advent encourages us to focus more attentively on this truth of our Christian faith.

    Some of us might hear today’s readings and miss this truth because we’ve been taught that they focus only on human sinfulness. Others, upon hearing this truth, might lament “Really?” because they have encountered some in our Church who insists that God will never truly welcome the remarried, the divorced, the homosexual. Still a few of us hearing today’s readings may feel unworthy because of how we have sinfully squandered away our lives this year. 

    Yet, at the heart of our readings today is God's love for us—always faithful, always enduring, always saving.

    By using today’s readings to focus our Advent preparations on repentance, the Church, like a good mother, assures us again that God's love in Jesus is the divine balm—the holy medication, if you like—that will redeem us from sinfulness. We would be so, so wrong to misinterpret today’s readings as permission to continue fixating ourselves on our unworthiness because of sin. 

    Advent exists to redirect our gaze again onto the singular Christian truth that God's redemption comes to us in no other form than in Jesus who incarnates God's love with his birth. A graced way we can more fully experience this truth in Advent is to practice stillness at this time.

    Being still in order to be mindful of God is how Jesus lived his life. Recall the many times in the gospels when Jesus stilled himself in prayer to more be aware of God’s presence and action in his life: before he heals and when his day is done are just two examples. Jesus calls us to do likewise because being still to be mindful of God is his way of shaping us to better live in God's love and to more wholeheartedly experience God’s forgiveness. 

    The Jesuit Larry Gallick once described this practice of Advent stillness as holding "our breaths as God does a fantastic athletic act of leaping from eternity into time, from heaven to earth, from Spirit to Flesh, and from mystery to history, for this is how we can begin to see God, the Divine Artist painting and sculpturing our image within His." 

    This mindfulness of God’s incarnation is really what Christmas is about. Knowing this can help us to answer this Advent question better: ''What will Jesus' birth once in history and even now in my life story, mean to me especially, if not differently, this coming Christmas?"

    As a time of grace, Advent stillness affords us the space to answer this question by reexamining the quality of our Christian life as we prepare for Christmas. And isn't such a reexamination before God in order to align our lives with God’s life what repentance is all about? 

    “Never pass up an opportunity to shut up.” I like this phrase because I think it is an apt description of how Advent stillness is a necessary disposition we can adopt to better prepare for Christmas. Shutting up helps us to really listen to our hearts’ desire for Christmas. Shutting up also helps us to still ourselves before God; this enables us to open ourselves to consider more honestly the response we are making to God with our live—both to the mystery of God's action at the first Christmas and to each day as Jesus comes to birth into our lives anew and always.

    Shutting up and being still in Advent does not mean that nothing is going on; rather, something is in fact going on. This something is like two friends who have come to that remarkably beautiful point of not needing to say much because they intimately know each other, and now have the opportunity to deepen their honesty, trust, ease and commitment together in the silence. Advent stillness invites us into this same experience with no other but God. Then, we can be truly mindful of God and God’s loving actions in our lives, particularly of God’s mercy.

    In our first reading, the prophet Isaiah reminds the exiled Israelites that God will always come to console all that await God. But he also reminds them elsewhere in his writings that as long as their inner voices of self-recrimination keep shouting their guilt and shame, words of Gods “comfort” cannot be heard. 

    And isn't this also true for us if all we are concerned with, even obsessed about, in repentance is our sins? What gets lost is the good tidings of God’s peace on earth that comes with Jesus forgiving us.

    In fact, aren’t we in danger of forgoing this good news whenever we lose ourselves to the unrestrained commercialism of Christmas gift-giving and festivity, or whenever we busy ourselves too much with the minutiae of Christmas preparations only to miss its true spirit?

    This is why John the Baptist's cry to "repent, prepare the way for the Lord, and make straight his paths" this evening must jolt us out of our year-in, year-out way of living Advent time. Nothing good can come out if we indulge ourselves once again this year in our complacent familiarity with John's message of repentance. 

    Much of God’s good will however be ours if we but dare to heed his call, and to make the only truly human response we can to the excessive goodness of God’s mercy: that we repent out of love for God and not because we have to settle accounts with God.

    The hope our readings offer today is that repentance rooted in love of God will lead us into living more gently with God. Who amongst us here does not like sitting by a quiet stream or to be close to a person who has a gentle stream within them? Perhaps the best gift each of us can receive through repentance at Advent time is “a quieter-inside self whose mountains of resistance have been leveled, whose valleys of inferiority have been filled in and whose roughness has been smoothed by God’s gentle presence” (Larry Gallick). 

    If this gentleness with God is what you truly desire for Christmas, then don’t hesitate to imitate what Michele did by sharing his life with Francis. Share with God in your Advent prayer about your life and, more so, about your heartfelt desire for forgiveness to live with God gently. 

    Then, be open to God’s reply: whether in prayer, in someone’s words, in a consoling experience, God will respond because God comes to us as Immanuel, God-with-us and God-for-us, always.




    Drawn in parts from Larry Gallick, SJ


    Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore
    photo: april hoeller (christmasmagician.blogspot.com)




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Greetings!
Greetings!
Peace and welcome, dear friend.
I hope you will find in these posts something that speaks to you of the God who loves us all and who always holds us in the palm of his hand. Blessings!
Blog Archive
Blog Archive
Fall in Love, Stay in Love
Fall in Love, Stay in Love

"Nothing is more practical than finding God, that is, than falling in love in a quite absolute way final way. What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything. It will decide what will get you out of bed in the morning, what you do with your evenings, how you spend your weekends, what you read, who you know, what breaks your heart, and what amazes you with joy and gratitude. Fall in love, stay in love, and it will decide everything."

Pedro Arrupe, sj, Superior General, 1965 - 1983

About Me
About Me
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is a 50something Catholic who resides in Singapore and works for the Church. He is a priest of the Roman Catholic Church.
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