December 24, 2020
Editor’s note: This reflection was originally published on Fr. Mark-David’s Facebook page.
Whatever you are doing on this morning before Christmas:
preparing, baking, wrapping, decorating
worrying, grieving, traveling, working,
try, just try, to begin to shift gears
away from all the ways this Christmas is different.
Disappointment is hard to shove aside,
certainly when we are disappointed
especially when we see those we love disappointed.
Loss, grief, and loneliness are even harder to displace.
They nag at us like toothache or pain we can’t forget.
We should try, if we can, to shift our focus
away from what I don’t have, what I have lost
and towards God.
Christmas is, after all, about Jesus the Christ.
The twelve days of Christmas, no matter how sober,
are about who God is, and God is, for us.
We are not abandoned, or alone, we are loved.
A wise man, Cardinal Martini wrote:
“we are loved just as we are
despite all our weaknesses,
despite our deeply embedded sins;
better still, because of them God became flesh
to save us from our own mistakes;
from our omissions, stupidity and ignorance
as well as from our despair and cruelty.
The God who forgives us without limit
is the one from whom everything is and on whom
everything depends,
to whom all tend and return.”*
These days, these hard times
they eat at our self confidence, devour our hope.
The pain and confusion they cause
gets all mixed up in our soul
and we forget who we are, and why we are
why we are important and what we can do.
Tonight’s little story from Luke’s Gospel
is the candle in the window of our soul
shining a light that reminds us we are precious
precious to God.
Believing that is so hard,
it takes time to hear that in our heart.
So little by little, throughout this morning
while the cookies bake
while we worry about all the things there are to worry about,
while we are sad about all there is to be sad over,
try to shift, just a little, our attention
to the Love that never leaves us
even when we can’t feel it,
that’s the love we celebrate tonight
even when we can’t celebrate anything else.
Amen.
*Carlo Cardinal Martini, Toward the Light: On Advent and Christmas, Paulist Press, 2015.
Paulist Fr. Mark David Janus is president of Paulist Press.