Reflections on Life
By Melvin Arrington
As the saying goes, “love makes the world go ’round.” Love, the eternal theme, was there at the beginning of time when God made the world and everything in it. But sin entered the Garden and destroyed the intimate relationship humanity enjoyed with the Creator. Ever since Adam’s transgression, religion (from Latin, religare, meaning “to bind again, re-connect”) has offered us the hope of re-establishing the bond of communion that was torn apart by Original Sin.

Despite our tendency to go our own way, our Heavenly Father still cares for us and draws us to Him. And because our hearts were made for unity, we feel pulled toward the source of love like steel to a magnet, as the 17th century Mexican nun-poet Juana Inés de la Cruz put it. We somehow have this notion that man searches for God, but in reality it’s the other way around. The “Hound of Heaven” is constantly in pursuit of us.
From Genesis to Revelation God demonstrates His abiding concern for His children. After Adam sinned he hid from his Creator, but the Lord went looking for him and called out to him (Genesis 3:8-9). In I Samuel 3 He repeatedly summoned the boy Samuel, who would grow up to be a great prophet. The Gospels record how the Apostles, when they heard the Master calling them, left their former ways of life and followed Him. And Revelation 3:20 tells us that Jesus stands at the door knocking, waiting for us to open up so that He can come into our hearts, an image brilliantly captured by William Holman Hunt’s famous painting, “The Light of the World” (c. 1854). Simply put, God wants us to be in communion with Him.
It should come as no surprise that the first of the nine Fruits of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22-23) is love, that tricky little word with no true synonym that has so frequently been misunderstood. C. S. Lewis, in his classic study The Four Loves (1960), clears up some of the confusion. There are, he explains, three “natural” types: familial affection, friendship, and the well-known romantic variety, the latter reaching its ultimate expression in the conjugal bond between husband and wife. These three dimly reflect the “supernatural” form, charity, often denoted by the Greek term agape and the Latin caritas.
When we think of love, it’s usually something like tender affection for someone. Consider all the songs and movies that celebrate romance. But the real thing, agape, goes far beyond that. It’s sacrifice, giving of self until there is nothing left to give. It’s caring for someone who probably will not love us in return. Narcissism and lust have nothing to do with it; they are not even on the same spectrum.
Some may remember these lines from two popular 1960s songs that ponder the meaning of life: “What’s it all about, Alfie? Is it just for the moment we live?” and “Is that all there is?” In the 1978 movie Superman, Clark Kent’s earthly father admits he doesn’t know why his foster son came to Earth, but he’s certain that he has come for a reason. We were all made for a purpose, and we have a reason for living, but it’s not to make a lot of money or pursue worldly pleasures, as our modern culture would have us believe. That’s not all there is. There’s so much more. In short, it’s all about love.
The Baltimore Catechism says God made us to know, love, and serve Him in this life and be happy with Him for all eternity in the next. The Father wants us, His adopted children, to enter into a personal relationship with Him, and when we do we’ll soon discover that love manifests itself most noticeably in sacrifice and service.
As Christians, we’ve all been sent on a mission. The last thing Jesus told His followers before His Ascension was to go out and evangelize the world (Matthew 28:19-20). That’s our mission today. At the conclusion of mass we hear: “Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.”
For a long time I prayed for some sign that would reveal to me my place of service. As I was making daily visits to a local nursing home where my mother was a resident, I had no idea the Lord was going to send me there as a volunteer. That had never occurred to me, even though the opportunity was right under my nose; I was just too blind to see it. In time I came to realize I’d finally found what I’d prayed for. That was and still is my mission, until I’m sent elsewhere. God works perfectly, but in mysterious ways.
I’d like to imagine one reason He created families was so parents could gain a better understanding of the meaning of John 3:16. The Father gave up His only Son and made Him suffer a cruel and excruciatingly painful death on the Cross in order to redeem us and save us from hell, which means eternal separation from God. Once parents reflect on how they would willingly make any sacrifice for their children, they can begin to comprehend how deeply our Heavenly Father cares for us.
The old cliché still rings true. Love does make the world go ’round. God continues to do His part, but are we doing ours? As the New Year begins, I need to ask myself a couple of questions that you may wish to ask yourself as well: “Do I put the Lord above everything else in my life?” and “Do I show as much concern for the welfare of others as I do for myself?” How we answer will reveal whether we’re helping the world go ’round or hindering it.

(Melvin Arrington is a Professor Emeritus of Modern Languages for the University of Mississippi and a member of Oxford St. John Parish.)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
We’re all familiar, I suspect, with the difference between justice and charity. Charity is giving away some of your time, energy, resources and person so as to help to others in need. And that’s an admirable virtue, the sign of a good heart. Justice, on the other hand, is less about directly giving something away than it is about looking to change the conditions and systems that put others in need.
No doubt, we’re all familiar with the little parable used to illustrate this difference. In brief, it goes like this: A town situated on the edge of a river finds itself confronted every day by a number of bodies floating downstream in the river. The townsfolk tend to the bodies, minister to those who are alive and respectfully bury the dead.

They do this for years, with good hearts; but, through all those years, none of them ever journey up the river to look at why there are wounded and dead bodies floating in the river each day. The townsfolk are good-hearted and charitable, but that in itself isn’t changing the situation that’s bringing them wounded and dead bodies daily. As well, the charitable townsfolk aren’t even remotely aware that their manner of life, seemingly completely unconnected to the wounded and dead bodies they’re daily attending to, might in fact be contributing to the cause of those lost lives and dreams and that, good-hearted as they are, they may be complicit in something that’s harming others, even while it’s affording them the resources and wherewithal to be charitable.

The lesson here is not that we shouldn’t be charitable and good-hearted. One-to-one charity, as the parable of the Good Samaritan makes clear, is what’s demanded of us, both as humans and as Christians. The lesson is that being good-hearted alone is not enough. It’s a start, a good one, but more is asked of us. I suspect most of us already know this, but perhaps we’re less conscious of something less obvious, namely, that our very generosity itself might be contributing to a blindness that lets us support (and vote for) the exact political, economic and cultural systems which are to blame for the wounded and dead bodies we’re attending to in our charity.

That our own good works of charity can help blind us to our complicity in injustice is something highlighted in a recent book by Anand Giridharada, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. In a rather unsettling assertion, Giridharada submits that generosity can be, and often is, a substitute for and a means of avoiding the necessity of a more just and equitable system and fairer distribution of power. Charity, wonderful as it is, is not yet justice; a good heart, wonderful as it is, in not yet good policy that serves the less-privileged; and philanthropy, wonderful as it is, can have us confuse the charity we’re doing with the justice that’s asked of us. For this reason among others, Giridharada submits that public problems should not be privatized and relegated to the domain of private charity, as is now so often the case.

Christiana Zenner, reviewing his book in America, sums this up by saying: “Beware of the temptation to idealize a market or an individual who promises salvation without attending to the least among us and without addressing the conditions that facilitated the domination in the first place.” Then she adds: When we see the direct violation of another person, a direct injustice, we’re taken aback, but the unfairness and the perpetrator are obvious. We see that something is wrong and we can see who is to blame. But, and this is her real point, when we live with unjust systems that violate others we can be blind to our own complicity because we can feel good about ourselves because our charity is helping those who have been violated.

For example: Imagine I’m a good-hearted man who feels a genuine sympathy for the homeless in my city. As the Christmas season approaches I make a large donation of food and money to the local food bank. Further still, on Christmas day itself, before I sit down to eat my own Christmas dinner, I spend several hours helping serve a Christmas meal to the homeless. My charity here is admirable and I cannot help but feel good about what I just did. And what I did was a good thing! But then, when I support a politician or a policy that privileges the rich and is unfair to the poor, I can more easily rationalize that I’m doing my just part and that I have a heart for the poor, even as my vote itself helps ensure that there will always be homeless people to feed on Christmas day.

Few virtues are as important as charity. It’s the sign of a good heart. But the deserved good feeling we get when we give of ourselves in charity should not be confused with the false feeling that we’re really doing our part.

(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, Texas.)

SPIRIT AND TRUTH
By Father Aaron Williams
Early on the morning of Dec. 7, I offered Mass at St. Jude Pearl for a small group of people so we could take part in a old, but less well-known Advent tradition. On Saturdays in Advent, it has been customary in some places to offer a Mass of the Blessed Virgin Mary early in the morning before dawn and entirely by candlelight. This has come to be known as a ‘Roráte’ Mass — taken from the words of the Entrance Antiphon: Roráte cæli desúper et nubes pluant justum (Drop down dew, you heavens, from above, and let the clouds rain down righteousness).
The liturgical year often makes good use of the natural seasonal movements of the earth. The summer solstice occurs just before the feast of St. John the Baptist (June 24), while the winter solstice falls right before Christmas day. On the summer solstice each year, the days begin to grow shorter as we receive less and less light until the winter solstice when the days begin to grow longer. If we compare this natural occurrence with the two feast days that fall near those days, a symbolic meaning comes forward.
After St. John baptized our Lord, his followers came to him and said, “Rabbi, he who was with you beyond the Jordan, to whom you bore witness, here he is, baptizing, and all are going to him.” And John said to them, “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 2:26,30). Jesus Christ revealed himself to be the Light of the World, and so it is only fitting that when we reach the feast day of his Birth, that the amount of sunlight we receive each day grows longer and longer.
By offering Mass in total darkness in these last days before Christmas, the interplay of light and darkness in the church building can further underscore this feeling of longing for the Messiah — especially when the Mass is timed just right so that the Sun rises toward the end of the Mass. Something special happens when you are standing in a dark church hearing all those readings which prophecy a Messiah and then right around the time for Holy Communion light is beginning to fill the church from outside through the windows. You no longer need to hold a candle, for instance, so you can read from the hymnal. Saint Augustine makes reference to this symbolism in one of his sermons, “Let us celebrate this day as a feast not for the sake of this sun, which is beheld by believers as much as by ourselves, but for the sake of him who created the sun.”
Though the custom in the United States was to offer these Masses on Saturdays of Advent when the Mass texts was taken from the votive Masses of the Blessed Virgin Mary, other similar customer exist elsewhere. In the Philippines there is a tradition, dating at least to the 16th century of offering “Misa de Aguinaldo” (‘Gift Mass’). Each day from Dec. 16 to Dec. 24 the daily Mass is traditionally offered before dawn and entirely by candlelight. The same custom exists in some Latin American cultures under the name of “Misa de Gallo” (‘Rooster Mass’). These daily masses occur each day until Christmas when it is called the “Misa de los Pastores” (Mass of the Shepherds).
The custom of offering these Advent and Christmas Masses during the night hours is recorded as early as the 4th century by Egeria — a Galician historian who traveled to the Holy Land particularly to record the way in which Christians celebrated the liturgical year in Jerusalem. She writes that on the night before Christmas, it was custom in Jerusalem for the people to process through the streets with torches and candles leading to a dark church where Mass was celebrated before dawn. Pope Sixtus III was inspired by this tradition and instituted the first celebration of the ‘midnight’ Christmas Mass at St. Mary Major Basilica in Rome.
Roráte masses may be offered with or without music, on any day when it would be acceptable for the people to gather at an early hour. If a parish wanted to preserve the tradition as it was kept in America, the Votive Mass of the Blessed Virgin Mary for Advent as found in the Roman Missal could be used. Because there is little light, parishes could use commonly memorized songs such as ‘O Come, O come, Emmanuel’ — which can even be sung without instruments both for the ease of musicians who might have difficulty playing in the dark, but also to further underscore the anticipation of the season.

Silence is also another important element to these Masses. Silence denotes an expectation of sound, while darkness denotes the expectation for light. And, because enough light needs to be present on the altar for the priest to read the missal, those who decorate the sanctuary should make use of whatever candlesticks and candelabra the parish has available. These many lights add to the beauty of the celebration and help emphasize the altar as a common center for worship.

Reflections on Life
By Fran Lavelle
I was at Mass at the Cathedral on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. At the end of his homily, Father Anthony, in reference to Mary’s fiat, asked, “What ‘yes’ is Jesus asking of you?” I kicked that question around in my mind for the balance of the day. It spilled over into the next few days. Jesus is asking all of us for a “yes.” He is asking each one of us to say “yes” to loving and serving His people in our own unique way. With a heavy foot on the gas pedal of life, I realized this question needed to be seriously considered as the days of Advent were passing quickly.

It is my practice to be introspective at the end of the year. I took Father Anthony’s challenge as an opportunity to look back on where I’ve been spiritually and emotionally. It is always an affirming and challenging exercise. Without a doubt there are things on my personal to-do list that did not get done. I still need to Marie Kondo every closet in my house. There were also challenges for me spiritually. Some people refer to these challenges as periods of dryness. Maybe you too have experienced times when you felt like you were just going through the motions. I was able to identify when I felt an emptiness in my faith life, as well as identify the periods of great consolation when unexpected gifts and graces were received that were not anticipated like a colleague’s baby announcement or a visit from dear friends.

There was an ebb and flow to 2019 that at times felt like a bad plane ride with jarring turbulence and other times felt more like a gentle tail wind. This year’s evaluation was the foundation I needed to examine the question Father Anthony posed. My personal need for a decluttering specialist became apparent. When one is overwhelmed with stuff (figuratively or literally) one has two options, one can live with the stuff/chaos that clutters our lives or we can get rid of it. Physically getting rid of clutter (unless one is a true hoarder) is easy. It takes time, boxes and a trip to the nearest second-hand store to dispense with the physical stuff.

The emotional stuff/chaos is harder to get rid of. It is hard to lay down past hurts. It is hard to forget the times we have been dismissed by a colleague or family member. It is hard to make the tapes that recall the litany of hurts from our past to stop playing over and over in our heads. One can’t Marie Kondo those emotions, but one can overcome them. It became apparent to me that Jesus is calling me to let go of the chaos. It does not mean that it no longer exists, but that I have a choice to look like Pig Pen in the Peanuts cartoon or I can claim my peace amid chaos. My “yes” is an affirmation of my desire to not let the chaos and clutter gobble up precious time. The love of Christ, His peace, forgiveness and understanding cannot be manifested if it is not lived. I realized it was time for a hard re-set. To align my desire to love and serve Christ I must clean up the emotional clutter that gets in the way of me being my best self.

I was reminded of the Cherokee story of the two wolves. “One evening, an elderly Cherokee brave told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people. He said ‘my son, the battle is between two ‘wolves’ inside us all. One is evil. It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority and ego. The other is good. it is joy, peace love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith.’
The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather: ‘which wolf wins?’ The old Cherokee simply replied, ‘the one that you feed.’”

We are on the cusp of yet another year. It is the perfect time to seek and discern what “yes” Jesus is asking of you. We are assured in the gospel of Matthew to “… seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened.” Take the time to seek Him.

Peace and blessings to you this Christmas and throughout the new year. May you discern His call and may your “yes” bring you abundant joy and much love. As I sit in the peace and quiet of my home in Starkville, I am looking at the newest ornament on my tree. Yes, it is a wolf. A very, very good wolf.

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
Everywhere in church circles today you hear a lament: Our churches are emptying. We’ve lost our youth. This generation no longer knows or understands the classical theological language. We need to announce Jesus again, as if for the first time, but how? The church is becoming evermore marginalized.

That’s the situation pretty much everywhere within the secularized world today. Why is this happening? Faith as a spent project? Secularity’s adolescent grandiosity before the parent who gave it birth, Judeo-Christianity? The “buffered self” that Charles Taylor describes? Affluence? Or is the problem mainly with the churches themselves? Sexual abuse? Cover-up? Poor liturgies? Poor preaching? Churches too liberal? Churches too conservative?

I suspect it’s some combination of all of these, but I’ll single out one issue here to highlight, affluence. Jesus told us that it’s difficult (impossible, he says) for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven. No doubt, that’s a huge part of our present struggle. We’re good at being Christians when we’re poor, less educated and on the margins of mainstream society. We’ve had centuries of practice at this. What we haven’t had any practice at, and aren’t any good at, is how to be Christians when we’re affluent, sophisticated and constitute the cultural mainstream.

So, I’m suggesting that what we need today is not so much a new pastoral approach as a new kind of saint, an individual man or woman who can model for us practically what it means to live out the Gospel in a context of affluence and secularity. Why this?

One of the lessons of history is that often genuine religious renewal, the type that actually reshapes the religious imagination, does not come from think-tanks, conferences and church synods, but from graced individuals – saints, wild men and women who, like Saint Augustine, Saint Francis, Saint Clare, Saint Dominic, Saint Ignatius or other such religious figures can reshape our religious imagination. They show us that the new lies elsewhere, that what needs fixing in the church will not be mended simply by patching the old. What’s needed is a new religious and ecclesial imagination. Charles Taylor, in his highly-respected study of secularity, suggests that what we’re undergoing today is not so much a crisis of faith as a crisis of imagination. No Christians before us have ever lived within this kind of world.
What will this new kind of saint, this new St. Francis, look like? I honestly don’t know. Neither, it seems, does anyone else. We have no answer yet, at least not one that’s been able to bear much fruit in the mainstream culture. That’s not surprising. The type of imagination that reshapes history isn’t easily found. In the meantime we’ve come about as far as we can along the road that used to take us there, but which for many of our children no longer does.

Here’s our quandary: We’re better at knowing what to do once we get people into a church than we are at knowing how to get them there. Why? Our weakness, I believe, lies not in our theological imagination where we have rich theological and biblical insights aplenty. What we lack are saints on the ground, men and women who, in a passion and fidelity that’s at once radically faithful to God and fiercely empathic to our secular world, can incarnate their faith into a way of living that can show us, practically, how we can be poor and humble disciples of Jesus even as we walk in an affluent and highly secularized world.

And such new persons will appear. We’ve been at this spot before in history and have always found our way forward. Every time the world believes it has buried Christ, the stone rolls back from the tomb; every time the cultural ethos declares that the churches are on an irrevocable downward slide, the Spirit intervenes and there’s soon an about face; every time we despair, thinking that our age can now longer produce saints and prophets, some Augustine or Francis comes along and shows that our age, like times of old, can too produce its saints; and every time our imaginations run dry, as they have now, we find that our scriptures are still full of fresh insight. We may lack imagination, but we don’t lack hope.

Christ promised we will not be orphaned, and that promise is sure. God is still with us and our age will produce its own prophets and saints. What’s asked of us in the moment is biblical patience, to wait on God. Christianity may look tired, tried and spent to a culture within which affluence and sophistication are its current gods, but hope is already beginning to show its face. As secularization, with its affluence and sophistication, marches unswervingly forward we’re already beginning to see a number of men and women who have found ways to become post-affluent and post-sophisticated. These will be the new religious leaders who will teach us and our children, how to live as Christians in this new situation.

(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, Texas.)

LIGHT ONE CANDLE
By Tony Rossi
Kids are used to getting presents for Christmas, and likely giving a few themselves. But Meadow Rue Merrill wants to expand their horizons by making it a fun family tradition to also give gifts to Jesus in a special way. That’s what inspired her children’s book The Christmas Cradle.
Merrill won a Christopher Award last year for her memoir Redeeming Ruth, about her adoption of a disabled orphan from Uganda. The mother of five joined me on “Christopher Closeup” recently to discuss The Christmas Cradle, which tells the story of a girl named Molly and her family who visit her Aunt Jenny to celebrate the holiday. Molly comes across a Christmas cradle in a box and asks her aunt its purpose. Aunt Jenny explains, “Growing up, we played a game to share God’s love with others. Each December, we sang carols, delivered meals, and visited people who were lonely. Then we wrote each act of love on a card and put it in the cradle as a gift for Jesus. On Christmas morning, we read the cards and prayed for each person we’d served.”
In writing the book, Merrill said she contemplated the questions, “How do we give a gift to Jesus, who has everything? I feel like we can do that best by giving gifts to other people in His name.”
Merrill doesn’t just approach that idea from the standpoint of a giver, but also a recipient of kindness. She recalls, “One of my favorite Christmas memories was when we truly had very little to give our kids, and a neighbor encouraged them to write letters to Santa. I was thinking, ‘Why? We don’t even have the ability to [afford anything].’ But on Christmas Eve, [this neighbor] invited our family over to her home, and there in the middle of her living room was a pile of Christmas gifts [for my family], including for the baby that I was pregnant with. As my husband and I brought those home that Christmas Eve, it really was the kind of magic that we all hope for – but somehow spending it on ourselves doesn’t make it happen. It’s when we find someone with a greater need than ourselves to give it away.”
Part of Merrill’s awareness of poverty stems from her experience adopting Ruth. She says, “Ruth won our hearts with her bright smile and the laughter in her eyes. It took a great amount of sacrifice to meet her physical needs, and yet the joy she brought us was so incredible.”
Unfortunately, Ruth passed away due to health complications, but her legacy lives on. Merrill says, “Getting to know Ruth and meeting her needs opened our eyes to the needs of children around the world, and in our own communities, who don’t have what they need. I realized how far our gifts, donations, and even time, can go when we invest those in the lives of someone else. Ruth changed our hearts forever in the way we look at things, and we want to reach out and share what we have with others.”
Merrill hopes that people don’t just read The Christmas Cradle, but act on it. She concludes, “When [families] have the opportunity to do a good deed for someone else, they can write it on a little piece of paper and put it in the cradle. Then on Christmas morning, we can remember those people who we served by taking out their names on the cards and praying for them.”

(Tony Rossi is the Communications Director for The Christophers, a Catholic media company. The mission of The Christophers is to encourage people of all ages, and from all walks of life, to use their God-given talents to make a positive difference in the world. Learn more at www.christophers.org.)