SOMETHING OLD, SOMETHING NEW

This weekend’s liturgies highlight the Holy Family, the Mother of God, and Peace. They come together perfectly in our liturgies—sadly, in our world, not so much.

In his Urbi et Orbi message (“To the City and to the World”) this past Christmas, Pope Francis highlighted the tragedies of the world’s culture that rejects family, Mary, and Jesus in favor of hostility and bloodshed. He mentions innocents slaughtered “…in their mothers’ wombs, in odysseys undertaken in desperation and in search of hope, in the lives of all those little ones whose childhood has been devastated by war. They are the little Jesuses of today…” [footnote: if you wonder why folks from, for example, Nicaragua, are flocking to the US border searching for refuge, you need to do some current events study].

It’s not just Hamas/Israel, or Russia/Ukraine; “How much violence and killing takes place amid deafening silence, unbeknownst to many! [We]…have no idea how many public funds are being spent on arms…so as to bring to light the interests and the profits that move the puppet-strings of war.”

Francis highlights other conflicts raging in the world where people die with the world effectively unaware: in Syria, Armenia/Azerbaijan, Sudan, South Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Nicaragua, Cameroon, Korea…” We live in a world in dire need of the Light of lights, the Child of the Mother of God, the focal point of the Holy Family. For too many of us, “out of sight, out of mind” can become the aphorism of our living. After all, we can’t solve ALL the problems of the world, can we? The trouble is that this seems to take us off the hook for what we actually can accomplish, fostering peace in our own families, communities, parishes, nations…

“From the manger, the Child Jesus asks us to be the voice of those who have no voice. The voice of the innocent children who have died for lack of bread and water; the voice of those who cannot find work or who have lost their jobs; the voice of those forced to flee their lands in search of a better future, risking their lives in grueling journeys and prey to unscrupulous traffickers.”

Can we be that voice, limited as we are? I quoted this before, and I will quote it again: “It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.” Our world is dark; let’s agree, in our own places and in our own ways, to be a candle. The Holy Family welcomes us; the Mother of God embraces us; the Prince of Peace calls to us. -Fr. David