Advent 2020

 

Advent 2020: A Response of Joy

STM Advent 2020_3450

Last year, every day as I walked across campus to Mass, I passed a man on his bicycle. More accurately, the man passed me, several times, as he furiously pedaled around the campus buildings. He was a stocky man with a large metal box, which blasted music throughout the streets of New Haven, strapped around his back. It wasn’t just any music: it was the most fitting music for this tough guy on his bicycle in the city of New Haven: classical music. After long days of work and study, it was an incredible gift to laugh at the weirdness of this daily encounter as I walked to Mass.

I miss the bicycle man; I miss the 5:30pm daily Masses at STM; I miss the basketball games and the Motts; I miss my brother being at school with me; I miss living in the library with my friends during exam week. Yet, amidst our daily sufferings, three days before Christmas, Mary says in the Magnificat: “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord; my spirit rejoices in God my savior. For he has looked upon his lowly servant. From this day all generations will call me blessed: the Almighty has done great things for me, and holy is his Name.” Mary has just arrived to visit her cousin Elizabeth, who praises Mary for the wondrous gifts she has been given. 

Not only is Mary’s response one of humility, but maybe even more beautifully, it is one of immense joy. Usually, we admire Mary for her loving trust in the Lord, and rightly so, but many times I tend to look toward Mary’s example as that of a transaction with God: I should be humble; I should be gentle; I should be kind. Yes, with the help of God, I must strive to improve in these areas, but Mary’s soul does not rejoice simply because she is humble; her soul rejoices because she has come to know God and her soul overflows with joy at the love she has for Our Lord. 

Although this is a time of loneliness and suffering for many, if nothing else, pray that you may come to know Jesus, the Son of God, personally, not as a concept, but as the Child born in Bethlehem. We come face to face with God in the confessional, at Mass and through the other sacraments. He is a personal God and He loves you. For the next three days may we ask God to know Him, not as we want Him to be, but as who He is: Love. On Christmas, despite our loneliness, sickness and suffering, let us reach for the hand of the Child who gives us a supernatural hope, one that transcends life’s circumstances. And, in the next three days, may we, like Mary, come to love God by whom we receive this joy, which Benedict XVI calls “the joy of one whose heart has received a ray of God’s light and who can now see that his hope has been realized--the joy of one who has found what he sought, and has himself been found” (The Infancy Narratives, 106).