Dear Friends,
I hope your Christmas season has begun with joy and blessings. As a church, our Christmas celebrations will continue through the celebrations of Epiphany and the Baptism of the Lord on January 11th. Unlike our culture, which has been celebrating Christmas since before Thanksgiving and ended it on the 25th, we are just starting our Christmas celebrations. Thanks to everyone who shared their charisms decorating the church and to those who lead us in song and prayer. Thanks, as well, for all the Christmas gifts; my diet begins soon.
The Jubilee Year will officially end on January 4th and the Holy Doors will be sealed and will wait for twenty-five years or until a new jubilee is called. Pope Leo had his last Jubilee Audience. This is what he shared with those who had gathered:
When Christmas is upon us, we can say: the Lord is near! Without Jesus, this statement – the Lord is near – could sound almost like a threat. In Jesus, however, we discover that, as the prophets had intuited, God is a womb of mercy. The Child Jesus reveals to us that God has a heart of mercy, through which he always gives life. In him there is no threat, but forgiveness.
Dear friends, today is the last of the Saturday Jubilee audiences, initiated last January by Pope Francis. The Jubilee is coming to an end; however, the hope that this Year has given us does not finish; we will continue to be pilgrims of hope! We heard from Saint Paul: “For in this hope we were saved”. Without hope, we are dead; with hope, we come to the light. Hope is generative. Indeed, it is a theological virtue, that is, a strength of God, and as such it does not kill, but gives birth and rebirth. This is true strength. What threatens and kills is not strength: it is arrogance, it is aggressive fear, it is evil that does not generate anything. The strength of God gives birth. This is why I would like to say to you, finally: to hope is to generate.
Saint Paul writes to the Christians of Rome something that makes us think: “We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now.” It is a very powerful image. It helps us to listen to and bring to prayer the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor. “All together”, creation is a cry. But many powerful people do not hear this cry: the wealth of the earth is in the hands of a few, very few, increasingly concentrated – unjustly – in the hands of those who often do not want to hear the groaning of the earth and the poor. God destined all the goods of creation for everyone to share in them. Our task is to generate, not to steal. Yet, in faith, the pain of the earth and the poor is that of childbirth. God always generates, God still creates, and we can generate with Him, in hope. History is in the hands of God and those who hope in Him. There are not only those who steal, there are above all those who generate.
Sisters and brothers, if Christian prayer is so deeply Marian, it is because in Mary of Nazareth we see one of us who generates. God made her fruitful and came towards us with her features, just as every son resembles his mother. She is the Mother of God, and our Mother. “Our hope”, we say in the Salve Regina. She resembles the Son, and the Son resembles her. And we resemble this Mother who gave a face, a body, a voice to the Word of God. We resemble her, because we can generate the Word of God here below, transforming the cry we hear into a birth. Jesus wants to be born again: we can give him body and voice. This is the birth that creation awaits.
To hope is to generate. To hope is to see this world become God’s world: the world in which God, human beings and all creatures walk together again, in the garden city, the new Jerusalem. May Mary, our hope, always accompany our pilgrimage of faith and hope.
Peace,
Fr. Damian