Today’s readings
St. Basil the Great was born in Caesarea in Cappadocia in the year 330. He was known for his learning and virtue, and his fight against the Arian heresy. He also wrote many wonderful works, the most revered of which is his monastic rule. He is known as the father of Eastern monasticism. Gregory Nazianzen was born in the same year. He too pursued learning and was eventually elected bishop of Constantinople. Basil and Gregory were friends, and Gregory reflected on their friendship in a sermon, of which I’d like to share some excerpts this morning.
“Basil and I were both in Athens. We had come, like streams of a river, from the same source in our native land, had separated from each other in pursuit of learning, and were now united again as if by plan, for God so arranged it.
“I was not alone at that time in my regard for my friend, the great Basil. I knew his irreproachable conduct, and the maturity and wisdom of his conversation. I sought to persuade others, to whom he was less well known, to have the same regard for him. Many fell immediately under his spell, for they had already heard of him by reputation and hearsay.
“Such was the prelude to our friendship, the kindling of that flame that was to bind us together. In this way we began to feel affection for each other. When, in the course of time, we acknowledged our friendship and recognized that our ambition was a life of true wisdom, we became everything to each other: we shared the same lodging, the same table, the same desires the same goal. Our love for each other grew daily warmer and deeper.
“Our single object and ambition was virtue, and a life of hope in the blessings that are to come; we wanted to withdraw from this world before we departed from it. With this end in view we ordered our lives and all our actions. We followed the guidance of God’s law and spurred each other on to virtue. If it is not too boastful to say, we found in each other a standard and rule for discerning right from wrong.
“Different men have different names, which they owe to their parents or to themselves, that is, to their own pursuits and achievements. But our great pursuit, the great name we wanted, was to be Christians, to be called Christians.”
Like John the Baptist in our Gospel today, Basil and Gregory sought to point the way to Jesus, the one among us whom people do not recognize. It was their goal to help all to come to know him rightly, to make straight the way of the Lord.
My mother has a lot of stories about me as I was growing up. Some of them are funny or interesting, others are just a little painful or embarrassing. I suspect your mother has or had stories like that about you too. My mother tells the story about me as a toddler. I don’t remember the story, obviously, but she thinks it’s pretty funny. Now, anyway. Apparently at that time, my parents had a habit of sneaking out of Mass after Communion. I know nobody here would do such a thing, but they did. So one day, if you can imagine this even possibly happening, I was making kind of a fuss – no way, right? My dad picked me up to go to the back of church. As we were headed to the back, I said in kind of a loud voice at a rather inopportune pause in the priest’s homily, “Are we going to get coffee cake and donuts now?” As impossible as this story is to believe about me, this is the story that my mother kept and reflected on in her heart!
You know, on paper, what we celebrate today is all clean and neat, and as the centuries have washed the story, it’s easy for us to swallow. I think about Linus famously proclaiming the Christmas story in the well-loved Charlie Brown Christmas cartoon, and it all seems so harmless. But we must never forget that the real Gift, the ultimate Gift, came to us in a not-so-neat package, in a way that was anything but clean and neat and easy-to-swallow. The gift of our salvation came to us at a great cost, from the beginning to the end, and the real source of our rejoicing ought to be that God was willing to pay so dearly for our souls.
This afternoon I was thinking about the fact that people don’t experience things in the same way. I was in downtown Naperville with my sister, my two nieces and my nephew. We were out having lunch and doing some Christmas shopping just as the weather was getting pretty nasty. My sister and I were probably not having as much fun trudging through the snow as Danny and Molly, whose attention I could not get because they were absolutely transfixed by the beauty of the snow. One person’s hassle is another’s delight – especially when the other ones are three and four years old!
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