December 21, 2007

A Shepherd's Message

By Daniel Cardinal DiNardo

“(Christ)  will transform us and show us his face, and we shall be saved.  (…)But this has not yet been accomplished; he has not yet given us the vision that will satisfy every desire. (…) Since we can as yet form no conception of his generation by the Father before the daystar, let us keep the festival of his birth of a virgin in the hours of the night. Since he is still beyond our understanding that his name endures forever and existed before the sun, let us at least recognize his dwelling among us he has placed beneath the sun.”    (St. Augustine, Sermon 194, #3-4)  

St.  Augustine was a great preacher, and a shrewd one. In one of his Nativity homilies, he shows, almost by indirection, the extraordinary substance that governs our faith by letting us see the emptying out of the Eternal Word, majestic and overwhelming, into the seeming ordinariness of our human condition. In Jesus Christ, our Brother and Lord, the very presence of God Himself meets us, becomes intimate with us. The Father did not ultimately send a prophet, a meteor, a cosmic natural miracle of sorts, or any such partial revelation. No, God spoke an ultimate word, His Eternal Word.  But that speech was the action of a flesh and blood human being, one like us in all things but sin. Further, being found in human form, Jesus Christ empties himself further, obediently accepting death on a cross. This obedience shatters the darkness of disobedience and fragmentation, the very meaning of sin. In his resurrection, Christ forms a corporate “society,” his Church: Christ is the Head and we are the members. This is genuine substance for hope. The human person, made in God’s image, is “being remade”  by the  lowliness and attractiveness of Jesus Christ, God’s very Son.  

Because this grace came to light in what seemed such ordinary circumstances, it demands a genuine conversion by us to see this light. The season of Advent each year invites us to share in the unfolding loving plan of the Father, to reawaken within us the sense of urgency for the gift of salvation found not in an idea, not in a philosophical system, but in the very person of the Word Made Flesh.  The greatest poverty and the greatest nothingness for us is a world without God. Left to our human ingenuity, we frequently invent pathetic substitutes for our desire for truth, for love. Our genuine desire is met ultimately by God who keeps approaching us and wanting us to see His face, the face revealed in his Son Jesus Christ.  Because we still live in obscurity, it is the role of faith and well founded hope to provide us with an ongoing genuine encounter with God, and through that, with a renewed sense of friendship and solidarity with others. The “Church” is the place for that and from our place as members in the Church, we can grow in our friendship and unity with all people.  The Advent/Christmas season is not about paltry things. It is about our very relationship with God and with one another.

In this time of grace, then, along with Archbishop Fiorenza, Bishops Vasquez and Rizzotto, along with all our clergy and religious, I wish each of you a most Blessed Christmas and a renewal of the sense of hope, a hope already established in Christ Jesus.

May the Lord grant us all a Blessed New Year and a time of peace.

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