RESOLVE TO WALK WITH CHRIST THROUGH THE EVENTS OF YOUR LIFE
As calendar years go, it is time to make New Year Resolutions, but for us Christians, our year, the Liturgical Year, began on the First Sunday of Advent. So, may I suggest that a good New Year Resolution for us may be to resolve to walk with Christ through the events of our lives in the light of a weekly reflection on the readings of this year’s Liturgical Calendar? I say this because such a weekly reflection on those Bible readings, done in an awareness of the ever-with-us Christ, will bind your heart to Christ’s heart. As St. Augustine discovered, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.”
This becomes even more real to us when we follow our weekly reflections with the communal celebration of the Mass where we, the St. Michael Parish Community, united with the hosts of heavenly and earthly believers, gather at Mass and thank God for all of God’s gifts. What weekly action could be more fruitful than this in guiding us and our families through the ups and downs of the coming year?
OUR HEAD START: ADVENT AND CHRISTMAS
We began our Liturgical Year reflecting on the magnanimous gift of God to us: God became one of us and lived a life that makes clear to us that “God wants to share the communion of his Trinitarian life with us.”1 This tenet of our faith, repeated many times in the twentieth century documents of the Second Vatican Council, resounds in the writings of the early fathers of the Church. For instance, St. Irenaeus, (130-206) said, “He became what we are so that we might become what He is.”2 and St. Athanasius (296-373) wrote, “The Son of God became man so that we might become God.”3 A more recent wording:
“Mary and Joseph,
the angels and archangels,
the shepherds
and now, my brothers and sisters in Christ, all of us —
what they and we behold with nearly breathless wonder
is the birth of the one who,
taking on our humanity,
will lay down his life for us in the Sacrifice of the Cross
so that we can become sharers in his divinity.”4
If you have reflected on the Liturgical readings of Advent and Christmas, what insights from this come with you into 2021?
STEPPING INTO THE REALM ON COMMUNION WITH GOD – Try it; you’ll like it!
The Church, in her wisdom, has created the Liturgical Year of weekly celebrations to step us into the realm of the “communion of God’s divine life along humanly accessible pathways suffused with his grace: words, gestures, objects, sacraments—tangible, visible, audible, persons and things, full of human and divine significance.”5 These weekly celebrations are opportunities for us to gather ourselves into God’s realm, experience the peace and joy that only comes from being in God’s world and then to take that joy with us as we walk down the church steps and back into the streets of Cranford and into the homes and businesses where we spend our week.
Resolve prayerfully to step weekly into your individual and our communal Christ-oriented journey. Doing so is integral to coming to the fullness of who you and we are meant to be according to the gifts God has in store for us. In these weekly encounters with God and Jesus, God’s Son and our brother – human, like us – allow yourself to be drawn into the “communion of his divine life along. . . pathways suffused with his grace: words, gestures, objects, sacraments—tangible, visible, audible, persons and things, full of human and divine significance.” Reflect on the events of your past and future weeks from this Gospel-oriented, joy-filled perspective: Rejoice, the Lord is near.
Sister Loretta
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Internet Resources:
Creighton Prayer Ministry Daily Gospel and Reflections
Catholic Mom Daily Gospel Reflections
Bishop Robert Barron Daily Gospel Reflections
- Di Noia O.P., J. Augustine. Grace in Season: The Riches of the Gospel in Seventy Sermons, Cluny Media, 2019.
- St. Irenaeus, Adv. haeres
- St. Athanasius, De inc
- Di Noia O.P. Grace in Season: The Riches of the Gospel in Seventy Sermons.
- Ibid.
