Sunday Gospel Reflection, January 7, 2018: You shall be radiant...

 You shall be radiant… 

Does Christ’s light dwell in you? 

   Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the visit of the magi from the east to see the newborn king of the Jews described in Matthew's Gospel is that the magi are not themselves Jewish.  To the contrary, they are astrologers from foreign lands who have had an intimation of the revelation God intends for all peoples, a glimpse of the divine light that is Jesus, calling all nations of the world to him.  Their response is fitting:  they prostrate themselves and do Jesus homage, knowing that the divine light that brought them to him can only have been revealed by God.  It is easy to imagine that they would, upon departing for their country, carry some glimmer of that light dwelling within them, shining for all the world to see.

   The magi, like the kings of Tarshish and the Isles, the kings of Arabia and Seba mentioned in Psalm 72, come to pay Christ homage -- for all nations shall serve the son of God.  Why?  Because Jesus, the king of our hearts, comes bearing a love that is for all, a love of justice and peace; Jesus is God’s grace incarnate.  We, in turn, as Paul tells the Ephesians, must be aware that we bear the responsibility of the stewardship of that grace thanks to the revelation that was made know to Paul, and communicated by Paul to us.  Moreover, as stewards, we are called to bear that grace to the whole world – we are meant, in the darkness of non-belief, to be a light shining for all, a guide to faith in Christ.  As foretold by the prophet Isaiah, thanks to the birth of Jesus Christ, our light has come, the glory of the Lord shines upon us, and indeed even from deep within us:  thanks to God’s grace, we shall be radiant, blessed by the indwelling of the light of Christ, and the love of God in our hearts. 

   So let us allow that mystery to unfold!  Let the light that filled those who precede us come to dwell in us as well, that we might be what we are called to be, a revelation of God’s grace, an experience of the living Christ for all the world to see!

This post was based on Fr. Pat’s Scripture class.

Image source:  Wordle (http://www.wordle.net)

A proper spirituality of family (Wendy Wright)

   A proper spirituality of family… is about intense, intimate community, bodies intermingled and conjoined, the noise and busyness of providing, care-taking, and stewarding, the complexities of intergenerational struggle, the love of particular persons.  It is about dwelling in one place for a long time with a community of not always like-minded people, about immersion in the conflicting, sometimes soul-devouring dynamics of the social, political, and economic world…

   The spiritual lessons of family are thus derived from the experience of being very much in the world, not apart from it.  Those lessons are legion.  They include, among others, the spiritual arts of welcoming and letting go and of intimacy and otherness, the enactment of rituals of mutual need and nourishment, the contemplation of the is-ness of things, and especially, the continual practice of radical forgiveness.

--Wendy Wright, Ignatian-Salesian Spirituality and Familied Life

Image source 1:  Rembrandt, Simeon and Anna Recognize the Lord in Jesus (1627)
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/12/Rembrandt_-_Simeon_and_Anna_Recognize_the_Lord_in_Jesus_-_WGA19102.jpg

Image source 2:  Francesco Rizzi, Holy Family with Simeon and John the Baptist (late 15th-early 16th c.)
https://images.fineartamerica.com/images-medium-large/holy-family-with-st-simeon-and-john-the-baptist-francesco-rizzi-da-santacroce.jpg

And when his Lady Mother leans upon the crib... (Thomas Merton)

 When the white stars talk together like sisters

And when the winter hills

Raise their grand semblance in the freezing night,

Somewhere one window

Bleeds like the brown eye of an open force.

             

Hills, stars,

White starts that stand above the eastern stable.

             

Look down and offer Him

The dim adoring light of your belief,

Whose small Heart bleeds with infinite fire.

           

Shall not this Child

(When we shall hear the bells of His amazing voice)

Conquer the winter of our hateful century?

           

And when His Lady Mother leans upon the crib,

Lo, with what rapiers  

Those two loves fence and flame their brilliancy!

             

Here in this straw lie planned the fires

That will melt all our sufferings:

He is our Lamb, our holocaust!

             

And one by one the shepherds, with their snowy feet,

Stamp and shake out their hats upon the stable dirt,

And one by one kneel down to look upon their Life.

--Thomas Merton, A Christmas Card

Image source:  Ambrogio Bergognone, Madonna del Velo (1500s)
http://www.jesus-story.net/painting_birth_christ.htm

Poem source