Dear Friends,
This year you are getting a two for one special! Both Christmas and the Feast of Mary the Mother of God (January 1) fall on a Sunday this year. Most years, we celebrate those two holy days and then have to turn right around and celebrate the Sunday liturgies. In many ways this might make it easier for you. For others, it becomes a challenge. Those who try to celebrate family events on the weekends before and after Christmas find themselves without a weekend to use. Those who need the weekends to shop and prepare find themselves short on time. Hopefully, you have been planning ahead and have figured out how to make the best use of the days that remain of Advent.
With the liturgical bargain of getting two for one this year, how very important it is then to make sure we gather with our community to praise and worship this amazing God who chose to come and live among us, taking on our human flesh.
There are those who will not be with us this Christmas. They are the ones who claim that they are spiritual, but not religious. It is a claim that absolutely makes no sense to me. They think that they can have a spirituality without a church. I know of no spirituality outside the relationships that constitute the daily life of my community, my church. Clearly, they do not know the story of Jesus and his forming a group of disciples.
The theologian, Romano Guardini, whom we read much of when I was in the seminary, noted that his conversion experience began with the spiritual desire to “lose his life in order to find it.” At that point he ran into a dilemma: “To give my soul away—but to whom? Who is in the position to require it from me? So to require it that, in the requiring, it would not again be I who lay hold of it? Not simply “God.” For whenever a person wants to deal only with God, then he says “God” but means himself. There must also be an objective authority, which can draw out my answer from self-assertion’s every refuge and hideout. But there is only one such entity: the…church in her authority and concreteness. The question of holding on or letting go is decided ultimately not before God, but before the church.” Guardini was very aware of our ability to fool ourselves, to make ourselves into our own god. We become not spiritual, but so turned in on ourselves that we become the object of our worship. By being a part of a community, of a church, we are held accountable to a truth greater than ourselves.
Being a part of a church does not mean that the individual journey is lost. Yes, it is important to have a personal prayer life, yes, it is important to reflect alone and in silence, yes, we each will have our own journey of discovering the presence of God in our lives. But, it is in common prayer and song that we lay aside the burden of self-consciousness; we retell the stories of the encounter that brought us together. In worship we become participants, living members of a body, rather than observers and connoisseurs. We join with others to become something much greater than we could ever be alone.
Please bring your family members to church with you this Christmas, so that they can experience a living community gathered in prayer. The truth expressed in the Old Testament and proclaimed again by Jesus was that whenever two or three are gathered in his name, he would be present. So, invite your family into the presence of God this Christmas by joining the church in prayer. After all, it is Jesus’ birthday we are celebrating.
Peace,
Fr. Damian