This blog is based on references in the Bible to fear. God wills that we “BE NOT AFRAID”. Many theologians state that the eighth deadly sin is fear. It is fear and its natural animal reaction to fight or flight that is the root cause of our failings to create a Kingdom of God on earth. By “the power of the Holy Spirit” we can be witnesses and “communicators” of a new and redeemed humanity “even to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:7 8). This blog is dedicated to Mary the Mother of God.
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Sunday, December 3, 2017
First Sunday of Advent December 3
FEAST OF SAINT
FRANCIS XAVIER
Isaiah, Chapter 63,
verse 17
Why do you make us wander, LORD, from your
ways, and harden our hearts so that we do not fear you? Return for the
sake of your servants, the tribes of your heritage.
This
chapter in Isaiah is called the Divine Warrior and Isaiah in this chapter
refers to Christ as a warrior. Isaiah laments that we in our weak human nature
have turned our hearts away from God and that we have no fear of divine
justice. Have we become so enamored with the world and our own lives that when
we look into the heavens at night we only see impressive specks of glittering
rocks we call stars and not the love of the creator which made them? There is
an expression, “Attitude is everything!” and so what should our attitude be and
why is Isaiah lamenting that Israel did not fear God? The answer lies in our
personal attitude toward life. Holy fear is born out of love and is a response
to the God the creator; it is a fear more closely related to awe. It is the
loving fear of a child that does not want to disappoint a parent and goes to great
lengths to please them. So we should develop this sense of Holy fear doing what
is right and good to please the Father. Remembering that, “Whether you eat or
drink, whatever you do, do all to the glory of God. (1 Corinthians 10:31). Let
us daily ask of our Lord to remove our hearts of stone and give us a heart of
love thus making the winter brighter and our burdens lighter and bring cheer to
the hearts of all we encounter. May we through love be brought to Holy fear
enabling us to be careful in the practice of our faith and bring us to a spirit
of penitence.
May
we with the psalmist say, Lord, make us turn to you; let us see your face and
we shall be saved. (Psalm 80)
For us Catholics, the
new Liturgical Year commences with the first Sunday of Advent. In this new
liturgical year, the Church not only wishes to indicate the beginning of a
period, but the beginning of a renewed commitment to the faith by all those who
follow Christ, the Lord. This time of prayer and path of penance that is so
powerful, rich and intense, endeavors to give us a renewed impetus to truly
welcome the message of the One who was incarnated for us. In fact, the entire
Liturgy of the Advent Season, will spur us to an awakening in our Christian
life and will put us in a ‘vigilant’ disposition, to wait for Our Lord Jesus
who is coming:
‘Awaken! Remember that God comes!
Not yesterday, not tomorrow, but today, now! The one true God, "the God of
Abraham, Isaac and Jacob", is not a God who is there in Heaven,
unconcerned with us and our history, but he is the-God-who-comes.’
The Season of Advent is
therefore a season of vigilant waiting, that prepares us to welcome the mystery
of the Word Incarnate, who will give the ‘Light’ to the womb of the Virgin
Mary, but essentially this time prepares us not only to welcome this great
event but to incarnate it in our lives. We could say that the true light enters
the world through the immaculate womb of Mary but it does not stay there. On
the contrary, this light flows out into our dark, obscure, sinful lives to
illuminate them, so that we can become the light that illuminates the world.
For this reason, let us live this time of waiting not only to celebrate a
historical memory but to repeat this memory in our lives and in the service of
others. To wait for the Lord who comes, means to wait and to watch so that the
Word of Love enters inside us and focuses us every day of our lives. As Blessed
John Henry Newman reminded us in a homily for the Advent Season: “Advent is a
time of waiting, it is a time of joy because the coming of Christ is not only a
gift of grace and salvation but it is also a time of commitment because it
motivates us to live the present as a time of responsibility and vigilance.
This ‘vigilance’ means the necessity, the urgency of an industrious, living
‘wait’. To make all this happen, then we need to wake up, as we are warned by
the apostle to the Gentiles, in Romans: ‘Besides this you know what hour it is,
how it is full time now for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to
us now than when we first believed” (Rm 13:11). We must start our journey to ascend to the mountain of the Lord, to be
illuminated by His Words of peace and to allow Him to indicate the path to
tread. Moreover, we must change our
conduct abandoning the works of darkness and put on the ‘armor of light’ and so
seek only to do God’s work and to abandon the deeds of the flesh. (Rm
13:12-14). Jesus, through the story in the parable, outlines the Christian life
style that must not be distracted and indifferent but must be vigilant and recognize even the smallest sign of the Lord’s
coming because we don’t know the hour in which He will arrive. (Mt 24:39-44)
FRANCIS XAVIER[2], surnamed the Apostle of the
Indies, was born of noble parents April 7, 1506, at Xavier, a castle near
Pampeluna, in Spain. In his eighteenth year he became one of the first members
of the Society of Jesus, at Paris, and from that moment gave himself up so
earnestly and perseveringly to meditation, self-denial, and the practice of
Christian virtues that by no desire was he so much animated as by that of
laboring and suffering for the glory of God and the salvation of men, wherever
and however it might please God. In the year 1541 he was sent as missionary to
India. Of his labors and sufferings there his works bear witness. He preached
the Gospel in fifty-two kingdoms, great and small, of India and Japan, and
baptized about a hundred thousand pagans and Muslims. Wherever he came, the
idols temples were thrown down, and churches built to the true God. He died in
1552, poor and destitute of all bodily comforts, but rejoicing in the Lord,
with these words, Lord, in Thee have I hoped; let me never be confounded. Let
us learn from St. Francis Xavier to labor, according to our ability, for the
glory of God and the salvation of our neighbor. -Although we cannot become
missionaries, we yet can pray, and we can join the Association for the Propagation
of the Faith[3].
It may seem strange that
in a calendar with only one annual cycle of readings, two of the Sundays share
virtually the same Gospel; and it may seem stranger still that these two
Sundays occur consecutively. The Gospel for the Last Sunday of Pentecost, taken from St. Matthew, contains
Christ's twofold description of the destruction of Jerusalem and of the world.
That same speech reemerges the following week on the First Sunday of Advent, though in the abridged form that appears
in the Gospel of Luke. Why this redundancy? The answer to this question teaches
us much about the season of Advent. Advent
(from the Latin word for "coming") is generally considered to be the sober yet joyful time of preparation for
the Lord's nativity, and rightfully so. This is the beginning of the
Church year that corresponds to the
ages before Christ, when the world pined away in darkness, waiting for
the Messiah. It is also why the closer we come to the Feast of the Nativity,
the more we are called by the liturgy to reflect on the events that led up to
it, e.g., the Annunciation, the Visitation, and so on. And it is why the season
of Advent is marked by an ever greater urgency in its prayers, begging the Lord
to come and tarry not. Yet like the closing Sundays after Pentecost, which
strike a predominantly apocalyptic note, the season of Advent also goads us to
prepare for the glorious Second Coming of the Lord at the end of
time. That is why the last and first Sundays of the liturgical year have the
same divine admonition: one is picking up where the other left off. This focus remains throughout Advent,
despite the season's increased attention on the Christ Child: in fact, during
Advent the traditional Roman Rite frequently speaks of both in the same breath.
This double commemoration of the first and second Comings makes sense, since
the prophets themselves never distinguished between the two. Yet there is a
more profound reason behind the conflation. The Church is teaching us that in
order to be ready for the Lord's triumphant return as Judge of the living and
the dead, we must prepare as our holy
fathers once did for His nativity. The lessons we learn from the season of
Advent are to be applied throughout our lives in preparation for our soul's
Bridegroom. By liturgically preparing for the Nativity of our Lord, soberly and
vigilantly, we prepare ourselves for the Final Judgment. Thus, Advent is a
season marked by a pious gravitas. Yet it should not be overlooked that
it is also a time of restrained joy.
The more we are prepared for our Lord's coming, the more we will truly welcome
it, moving beyond our well-deserved sense of unworthiness to an exultation in
His arrival. In the collect for the Vigil of the Nativity, for example, we
read: "Grant that we who now joyfully receive Thine only-begotten Son as
our Redeemer, may also, without fear, behold Him coming as our Judge." The
goal that the Church holds up for us during this important season is to have our hearts so ready for Christ that
they will do nothing but leap for joy when we appear before Him. Let us
therefore prepare for our Redeemer and our beloved Judge by heeding St. Paul's
advice through Advent, casting off the works of darkness, putting on the armor
of light, and draping ourselves in the virtues and graces poured forth upon us
by almighty God.
As we begin the Advent season let us take up the nature of God by
reflecting on these traits that make us a model for our children and our
sisters and brothers in Christ. Today reflect on:
Compassionvs. Indifference
Investing
whatever is necessary to heal the hurts of others (I John 3:17)
1503 Christ's compassion toward the sick and his many
healings of every kind of infirmity are a resplendent sign that "God has
visited his people" and that the Kingdom of God is close at hand. Jesus
has the power not only to heal, but also to forgive sins; he has come to heal
the whole man, soul and body; he is the physician the sick have need of. His
compassion toward all who suffer goes so far that he identifies himself with
them: "I was sick and you visited me." His preferential love for the
sick has not ceased through the centuries to draw the very special attention of
Christians toward all those who suffer in body and soul. It is the source of
tireless efforts to comfort them.
Full Cold Moon
According
to the almanac today is a Full Cold Moon; today would be a good day to take the
children/grandchildren out in the cold and enjoy hot chocolate afterward.
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