Open Our Hearts

Manger Scene at St. Francis Church, Granada, Niacaragua

Gospel Readings for December 25/ Christmas:
(Vigil) Matthew1:1-25
(Midnight) Luke 2:1-14
(Morning) John 1:1-18

Today we celebrate the great turning point in the story of salvation. For centuries the Jews had been waiting for the Anointed One, the one to bring about the Kingdom of Heaven and at His coming among them as a child they were filled with joy who looked upon Him. So, too, are we filled with joy today because we, like they, recognize that salvation has indeed come to us. Salvation is here in our very midst, as a child. A child is born to us! The one who is all-powerful makes Himself helpless for us. He Who is clothed in glory in Heaven comes wrapped in swaddling clothes. The One through Whom and in Whom all things exists comes among us and finds no place to lay His head. He who lives eternally in Heaven comes to dwell in a cave. The Bread of Life comes is laid in a manger, a feeding trough for animals, as a sign that even from the first moment of His existence among us He is meant to be consumed by the world that life might come to us and all of creation.

We come to celebrate the King of kings and Lord of lords who comes to be with us. That is the mystery we celebrate today, that God’s love for us is so great that He would stop at nothing to draw us closer to Himself in this life and eternity. If we grasp even the smallest bit of that love, we would surely die of joy.

I wish there was more time to speak of the beauty of the scriptures that we read for the Christmas Masses. For each of the Christmas Masses here at the parish there is a separate reading and there is so much that could be said about those passages. But I will limit myself to reflecting upon the gospel passages from each of the Masses.

Matthew’s Gospel passage illustrates how Jesus was truly born of human flesh, as we read the genealogy. This being born of human flesh is emphasized by the fact that Matthew highlights the person of King David in this narrative. King David was the one who a millennia before received the promise that an heir from his lineage would rise up as king of Israel and would reign gloriously, never allowing the scepter of power to be taken away. The people looked for centuries for this king and many had almost given up hope as they kingdom of Israel was divided and ultimately fell under the rule of foreign powers. But in the person of Jesus Christ, Matthew points out, the promise to David is fulfilled – a king is born from his line who indeed is to reign forever, both on earth and in heaven. Additionally, the genealogy includes four women, which was not done in Jewish tradition. This showed that Christ was indeed calling forth all people to be part of the Gospel. What’s more,  those women weren’t all Jewish, so even Gentiles were included in the mission of Jesus.

John’s Gospel is a bit more heady and theological, as it was written later with that intention in mind. He speaks of the eternity of the Word, how all things came to exist through Him. He helps us to understand that while Christ comes as a small child, He is also at the same time entire different from us. He is God; eternal, all-powerful.

Luke’s Gospel, with which we’re all more familiar, gives us the more historical account of how Joseph and Mary went to register for the census and while in Bethlehem Our Lord is born and placed in the manger. This again emphasizes the universality of the faith, including even – and especially! – those who are poor and lowly. The poverty of the Holy Family and the inclusion of the shepherds, which was a lowly task, highlight the call that all are important to God, loved by Him, and called to relationship with Him.

Each of these Gospels shows us a different aspect of the Lord. They have different authors, audiences, intentions, details, and yet they all come together to show us a beautiful picture of the Savior. In this we can see the beauty of the diversity of the Church. But even more, we see that God comes to us as individuals. He comes to each of us personally because we are all different. He knows, more than we do, that we are all at different places in our lives, have different needs, have different struggles, and are at different places in our relationship with Him. He knows all of these things and for this reason He comes still to be with us and to love us as we need to be loved. But He needs us to open up to Him. Certainly we’ve said yes to Him and opened up before, and we’ve already done so to some extent in that we are all here to celebrate this Mass. And yet He wants to have us open up that He might not only visit for a bit but truly remain and abide with us.

And so He comes to us, that little child who longs to love and be loved by us. Notice the beautiful image of Our Lord that we carried in tonight, the infant Jesus with arms outstretched, reaching out to us that we might pick Him up and in truly receive Him into our lives once more. He longs for us. He didn’t come simply to be among us for a time. He came to ransom us to Himself that we might be with Him forever in Heaven. Going back to Luke’s Gospel, we see that familiar story of how Christ is coming among us and yet He has no place to stay because there is no room in the inn. As He comes to us once more, He comes looking not for an inn but a dwelling place in our hearts. Let us open wide the doors of our hearts, that He might find a fitting dwelling place where He will indeed love and be loved. 

HWP: St. Thomas Aquinas' Prayer of Thanksgiving

Having begun the celebration of the birth of Our Savior, I now intend to turn to the next section in the 'Half-Way Prayers': Prayers of Thanksgiving after Mass. The first one is a beautiful prayer by St. Thomas Aquinas, complimentary to the one prayed prior to Mass. Enjoy!

I give you thanks, Lord, Holy Father,

Almighty and Eternal God,

who have been pleased to nourish me,
a sinner and your unworthy servant,
with the precious Body and Blood
of your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ:
this through no merits of mine,
but due solely to the graciousness of your mercy.

And I pray that this Holy Communion
may not be for me an offense to be punished,
but a saving plea for forgiveness.
May it be for me the armor of faith,
and the shield of good will.
May it cancel my faults,
destroy concupiscence and carnal passion,
increase charity and patience, humility and obedience
and all the virtues,
may it be a firm defense against the snares of all my enemies,

both visible and invisible,
the complete calming of my impulses,
both of the flesh and of the spirit,
a firm adherence to you, the one true God,
and the joyful completion of my life’s course.

And I beseech you to lead me, a sinner,
to that banquet beyond all telling,
where with your Son and the Holy Spirit

you are the true light of your saints,

fullness of satisfied desire, eternal gladness,

consummate delight and perfect happiness.

Through Christ Our Lord.

Amen.

A Visitation...not a visit.

Readings for Sunday, December 23/ Fourth Sunday of Advent:
Micah 5:1-4
Psalm 80:2-3, 15-16, 18-19
Hebrews 10:5-10
Luke 1:39-45

With Christmas just two days away, the natural tendency of our hearts is to look forward to the birth of the infant Lord, rightly so. But if we look too much to the Lord’s birth and miss the message of this last Sunday in Advent, we do ourselves a great disservice. In the past few weeks we have heard again and again the call to ‘prepare the way’ for the Lord’s coming and to ‘make straight the paths’ of our hearts. Those exhortations are certainly needed to get us into the mindset of receiving the Lord once more as the infant of Bethlehem. But as we conclude this blessed season, it is now time to transition from preparing for the Lord’s coming to understanding what to do when He finally comes. For this reason Mother Church holds up for our reflection this weekend the perfect model of discipleship: the Blessed Virgin Mary.

While some might be confused or even object to a homily on the Sunday before Christmas being about the Blessed Virgin Mary, it actually makes a great deal of sense if we understand the role of Our Blessed Mother in the salvation of mankind. Never does Mary try to draw the attention to herself, but always points to Christ. In a sense, her entire life and vocation is to become a bridge by which God comes to men and men go to God. God specially chose her and gave her unique graces to bear the only begotten Son of God in her own flesh and to bring Him forth into our world. It is Mary who inaugurates the ministry of Christ when at Cana she compels Him to perform his first public miracle. After the death of the Lord and even to this day in apparitions around the world, she always comes to us with a message of drawing closer to Christ and takes as her mission nothing other than making a reality the union of our souls with His. With that in mind, let us now turn to the story of Mary's Visitation to Elizabeth.

The first line of the Gospel tells of how Mary “set out and travelled to the hill country in haste to a town of Judah.” Notices that Mary travels with haste – she goes quickly and with specific intention in mind; she had a mission. That mission is why this story is known as the Visitation to Elizabeth and not just the Visit to Elizabeth. A visit is informal, relaxed. A visitation, however, is something formal, serious, and has a goal in mind. Having conceived God in her womb, Mary goes in haste to share the good news with Elizabeth, and because she bears Christ in her womb, John the Baptist leaps for joy at her presence and while still in his mother's womb begins to point to Christ and prepare the way for His coming into the world. Too, we find on the lips of Elizabeth the beautiful proclamation of the Lord’s coming to Earth as she exclaims “How does this happen to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” She knows it's not just her cousin who has arrived, but her cousin who holds within her the very God of all Creation. So we see that the Visitation is much more than a visit to a relative; it is a sharing of the joy of the Good News that salvation is at hand. In this we find both the model and the message of what we are called to do in these coming days.

In a couple of days the Lord Jesus will come once again looking for a place to be born. We celebrate His birth in Bethlehem in a manger, but the place He desires most to be born is within our very hearts. And once He takes rest within us, we, like Mary, will have the mission of going out to others to share the good news, to make visitations of our own in order to share the Good News of Christ’s coming and our salvation. Our world is desperately in need of the Good News. We need only check the newspapers or internet each day to hear more tragic news, more cause for despair and more a falling away from faith. It is our mission to share the Good News of Christ to those in need: those who need peace, forgiveness, hope, love, and redemption. And if they don't hear it from us Christians, they won't hear it at all. The question we each must ask, then, is to whom is the Lord calling us to make a Visitation? We all know people who need to be renewed in faith, ransomed from sin, or brought to Christ for the first time. May God grant us the discernment to know to whom we shall go, the courage to make that visitation to them, and the openness to speak His words to them. And this all we ask through Our Blessed Mother's loving intercession, that we might truly become bridges in imitation of her.

HWP: Prayer to the Virgin Mary

Being that Our Lady's entire mission is to bring us closer to the Heart of her beloved Son, it seems only right to conclude this section on Prayers of Preparation for Mass with a prayer to Our Lady. She who was for her entire life full of grace desires to bring us more deeply into the grace of the Sacraments and help us to receive them well, so let's open ourselves to her that she might do be able to perfectly fulfill her mission in us.

Prayer to the Virgin Mary before Mass

(Adapted for laity)

Mother of mercy and of love, most blessed Virgin Mary, I, a poor and unworthy sinner, fly to thee with all my heart and all my affection. I implore thy loving-kindness, that even as thou didst stand beside thy dear Son as He hung upon the Cross, so wilt thou also stand by me, a poor sinner, and beside all thy faithful people receiving the Most Sacred Body of thy Son. Grant us, that by thy grace, we may receive it worthily and fruitfully. Amen. 

Taken from the 'Quo Vadis Days' website at http://www.qvdays.org/.

Prayer Request

In about 7 hours from the time this is posted, I will be on a plane along with about two dozen seminarians from Notre Dame Seminary, my alma mater, on our way to a 9-day mission experience in Nicaragua. I had the joy of going on this mission four times during my formation at NDS, three of them as a student leader, and found they always bore great spiritual fruit and helped to prepare me for the life and ministry of the priest. I ask you to pray for the seminarians, that they might have hearts open to what the Lord desires to speak to them (a prayer for myself and the leaders of the trip would be appreciated as well). Thank you and God bless you for your generosity in offering prayers for us.

HWP: Prayer of Saint Thomas Aquinas

Continuing our Half-Way Prayers (HWP) of Preparations for Mass as we continue in this Advent Season, today I bring to you this text from St. Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274).

Prayer of St. Thomas Aquinas

Almighty and everlasting God, behold, I am about to approach the Sacrament of Thine only-begotten Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. I approach as one who is sick to the physician of life, as one unclean to the well-spring of mercy and goodness, as one blind to the light of eternal brightness, as one poor and needy to the Lord of heaven and earth. Wherefore I beseech Thee, of Thine infinite goodness, to heal my sickness, to wash away my filth, to enlighten my blindness, to enrich my poverty, and to clothe my nakedness, that I may receive the Bread of Angels, the King of kings, and Lord of lords with such reverence, such purity and faith, with such purpose and intention, as may conduce to the salvation of my soul. Grant, I beseech Thee, that I may receive not only the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of our Lord, but also the fruit and virtue of the Sacrament. O most indulgent and merciful God, grant me so to receive the Body of Thine only-begotten Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, which He took of the Virgin Mary, that I may be found worthy to be incorporated with His mystical body and numbered among His members. O most loving Father, grant that I may one day contemplate for ever face to face Thy beloved Son, whom now on my pilgrimage I am about to receive under a veil, who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, for ever and ever. Amen. 

Taken from p. 90 of The Daily Missal and Liturgical Missal from Editio Typica of the Roman Missal, 1962 printed by Baronius Press.

He's Real

Readings for Sunday, December 9/ Second Sunday of Advent:
Baruch 5:1-9
Psalm 126:1-6
Philippians 1:4-6, 8-11
Luke 3:1-6

When I was a teenager, probably around 13 or 14 years old, I wasn’t exactly the best kid, so my mom and step-dad got me involved in the youth group at our parish, hoping that some of that positive stuff would rub off a bit on me. One weekend the youth group went on retreat and as part of the retreat we were told to go to confession. So, not wanting to cause a scene or make things difficult for myself, I went to confession. I opened with the usual ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned’ and noted the length of time it had been before beginning with this: “I don’t believe in God and I think this is all a big waste of time.” The priest spoke with me about that and asked me to do something a bit different for my penance. He said when I was ready to do so, to look up toward heaven and say “God, if you’re out there, show yourself to me” and leave it up to Him. I agreed to do so and with my presence here today you can probably figure out how it all worked out in the end. When I came to know God was real, it was a very moving thing because I knew that if God was real, then Christ really died for me, saved me, loved me, and wanted to be the center of my life. It’s a matter first of realizing that God is real.

There are many in our world today who struggle to grasp this fully. Often the try to reduce the Bible to being a ‘How-to guide on being nice’ and suggest that the biblical stories are greatly embellished at best and at worst that they are fictional and were made up simply to convey messages. Even some biblical scholars and clergy have fallen into this trap of doubting that the miracles of the Bible were actual events. That is one of the reasons that I love the Gospel of St. Luke. He begins writing to Theophilos and describes how he has taken the accounts recorded by Christ’s disciples, stories he has been told from others and things he has personally witnessed and brought them together to form a complete picture and to provide and accurate description of the events of the life and ministry of Christ. He says it himself that he is writing a factual account. And he shows it in the passage we read today by noting all sorts of specific things. Rather than being ‘In a time long ago in a place far away’ like some fairy tale, St. Luke tells us of Tiberius Caesar, Pilate, Herod, Philip, Lysanias, Anna, Caiaphas, John, Zechariah, as well as places, years, and other details to emphasize the fact that the events he is describing are true. Placed in the context of the whole world around at the time, Luke begins to tell the factual story of Jesus – the Christ, the Messiah, the One for which Israel had been waiting for so many years.

Our first reading from the prophet Baruch tells of people coming from East and West to Jerusalem. This was a sign that God was calling the people back to Himself. Jerusalem was the home of the Temple, the dwelling place of God and the Jewish people had recently been conquered and dispersed among the nations, so this imagery was one of God calling everyone to Himself, to come home. For us today we have no earthly Jerusalem toward which we are called but rather a heavenly one. God is calling us to Heaven, where He eagerly awaits our arrival there for eternity. But it is for us to choose to go there.

The other day I heard a neat little phrase – God has no grandchildren, He only has sons and daughters. In an area that is culturally Catholic, it would be easy to be Catholic because our parents were Catholic and that’s just what we do. The challenge, though, is to choose the Catholic faith for ourselves - to make it my faith. If we’re Catholic only because someone before us was Catholic, then it’s time to claim our faith and to live it more boldly. And that starts with and continues by a relationship with Jesus Christ. We must know Christ and understand His voice to hear the direction to go in seeking after our heavenly homeland.

If there is anyone here who does not know Jesus Christ personally, where you can speak with Him as with a friend, ask Him for that and put it in His hands. If you have that relationship, are you actively preparing your heart to receive Him more deeply this Christmas and to be received by Him on the last day? Christ is very real and He is calling us to Himself. Let us not miss this blessed opportunity to draw near to Him.