Caritas Christi Urget Nos

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  • The Third Sunday of Lent: Trust in God’s Mercy

    The Third Sunday of Lent: Trust in God’s Mercy

    Today’s readings

    God is extremely patient when it comes to extending mercy. That’s what Jesus is talking about in this rather odd parable. I have to admit that I’m no gardener: I’m just not patient enough for that! So I needed to do a little digging to get a real sense of where this parable is going. I discovered that there are a couple of things we should all know before we roll up our sleeves and dig in to this little story. First of all, fig trees actually did take three years to bear fruit. During those three years, of course, they would need to be nourished and watered and pruned and tended. It was a lot of work, so when those three years of hard work were up, you better believe the farmer certainly wanted fig newtons on his table! And the second piece of background is that, since the days of the prophet Micah, the fig tree has been a symbol for the nation of Israel, and Jesus’ hearers would have known that. So when they hear of a fruitless fig tree, it was a little bit of an accusation.

    Conventional wisdom is that if the tree doesn’t bear fruit after three years of labor and throwing resources at it, you cut it down and plant a new one; why exhaust the nutrients of the soil? And if you’re an impatient gardener like me, why exhaust the gardener?! But this gardener is a patient one; he plans to give it another year and some extra TLC in hopes that it will bear fruit.

    So here’s the important take-away: God is not like Father Pat; he’s the patient gardener! And we, the heirs to the promise to Israel, if we are found unfruitful, our Lord gives us extra time and TLC in order that we might have time to repent, take up the Gospel, and bear fruit for the kingdom of God. That’s kind of what Lent is all about.

    But we have to remember: we don’t get forever; if we still don’t bear fruit when the end comes, then we will have lost the opportunity to be friends of God, and once cut down in death, we don’t have time to get serious about it. The time for repentance is now. The time for us to receive and share God’s grace is now. The time for us to live justly and work for the kingdom is now. Because we don’t know that there will be tomorrow; we can never be presumptuous of God’s mercy and grace.

    The consolation, though is this: we don’t have to do it alone. The Psalmist today sings that our God is kind and merciful: We get the TLC that our Gardener offers; the grace of God and the gifts of the Holy Spirit. We can trust in the Lord God, our great “I AM,” to come to us and lead us out of captivity to sin just as he was preparing to do for the Israelites in the first reading today. We can put our trust in God’s mercy. We are always offered the grace of exodus, all we have to do is get started on the journey and begin once again to bear the fruit of our relationship with Christ.

  • The First Sunday of Advent

    The First Sunday of Advent

    Today’s readings

    Sometimes I think when it was time to pass out patience, I was in some other line. Waiting can be a real challenge for me, and I usually fill up the waiting time with worrying or something equally pointless. I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in that. None of us likes to wait: that may be the hallmark of our current society. We want to get rich quick, have what we want when we want it, and if someone in traffic gets in front of us going slow, we go nuts. Well, maybe that last thing is just me, after all!

    That’s too bad, really, because it means we miss a lot of stuff. When we can’t be in the moment, hanging in there and waiting to see what’s about to happen, then we distract ourselves with all sorts of things and really miss the grace that we’re meant to have. And to all of that, the Church gives us an antidote today. That antidote is Advent, the New Year of the Church.

    And so we’ve gathered here today on the precipice of something new.  Do you feel it?  Do you come here with a sense of hope and expectation?  Are you on the edge of your seat?  Well, if not, I certainly hope you will be by the end of Advent.  That’s what it’s all about.  The readings for these four weeks will focus on hope and expectation and will give us a view of the salvation God is unfolding for his own people.  It’s a message that I think we need now, more than ever.

    Just look around us. Yesterday, I was writing the Universal Prayers that we’re going to pray in a few minutes, after the Creed. I knew I wanted to have a prayer in there about all that is happening in Chicago, and I looked back at last year’s Universal Prayers for this First Sunday of Advent, and you know what? We were praying for Ferguson, Missouri. That gave me a little chill. Then there is the growing unrest with Isis, and so many terrorist events around the world. If ever there was a time for hope and expectation, I think it’s now.

    We might need a little hope and expectation in our own lives as well. As we come to the end of the year, maybe this was a year filled with blessing or maybe it’s one we won’t miss. Most likely, it was a little bit of both. Perhaps this last year might have seen the death of a loved one, the ending of a relationship, or some other significant event.  As we end another year, some of us might be doing that with some regret, looking back on patterns of sin or the plague of addiction.  And so, for many of us, maybe even most of us, it doesn’t take too much imagination to know that there is a lot of room for renewed hope in our lives.

    But it’s hard to wait for the fulfillment of that hope, isn’t it? If we can’t wait for Thanksgiving to be open before we go Christmas shopping, it’s hard to wait to see what God is doing in our lives. There’s a scene in the movie “Christmas Vacation” that I thought of when I was getting this homily ready. Clark Griswold is in his boss’s office, bringing him a Christmas gift. There’s an awkward silence and then he tells Clark that he’s very busy. He picks up the phone and says, presumably to his secretary, “Get me somebody. And get me somebody while I’m waiting!” None of us likes to wait.

    So we have to find the grace in the waiting. Maybe that’s why I love Advent so much. I’m so generally impatient, that Advent has me slow down and re-create that space so that it can be filled with our Lord’s most merciful presence. So what do we do while we are waiting?  How do we live among the chaos?  How do we keep on keepin’ on when every fiber of our being wants to pack it in and hope for it all to be over real soon?  Today’s Gospel warns us that people will die in fright when they see what is going to happen, but it cannot be so for people of faith.  Even in the midst of life’s darkest moments, even when it seems like we can’t withstand one more bout of hopeless worry, we are still called to be a hopeful people.  “Stand erect,” Jesus tells us, “and raise your heads because your redemption is at hand.”  God is unfolding his promise among us and even though we still must suffer the sadness that life can sometimes bring us, we have hope for something greater from the one whose promises never go unfulfilled.

    Then what does a hopeful people do while we are waiting for the fulfillment of God’s promises?  How is it that we anticipate and look for the coming of our Savior in glory?  Our consumerist society would have us get up at midnight on Black Friday (which I contend is at least a mildly evil name) and battle it out with a few thousand of our closest friends for the latest gadget or bauble or toy.  And to that kind of thinking, Jesus says, “Beware that your hearts do not become drowsy from carousing and drunkenness and the anxieties of daily life.”  Getting caught up in the things of this world does us no good.  It does not bring us closer to salvation or to our God, and all it does is increase our anxiety.  Who needs that?

    Instead, we people of faith are called to wait by being “vigilant at all times.”  We are called to forgive those who have wronged us, to reach out to the poor and the vulnerable, to advocate for just laws, laws that protect religious freedom and the sanctity of human life from conception to natural death, to challenge world powers to pursue true justice and real peace, to give of ourselves so that those in need might have Christmas too, and even to love those who drive us nuts sometimes.  When we do that, we might just be surprised how often we see Jesus among us in our lives, in our families and schools and workplaces and communities.  It might just seem like Jesus isn’t that far from returning after all, that God’s promises are absolutely unfolding before our eyes.

    We are a people who like instant gratification and hate to wait for something good to come along.  Maybe that’s why the Christmas shopping season starts about two weeks before Halloween.  But if we would wait with faith and vigilance, if we would truly pursue the reign of God instead of just assuming it will be served up to us on a silver platter, we might not be so weary of waiting after all.  That’s the call God gives us people of faith on this New Year’s day.

    We’re gathered here on the precipice of something new, on the edge of our seats to see God’s hope unfold before us and among us.  Do you feel it?  Are you ready for it?

  • Thanksgiving

    Thanksgiving

    Today’s readings

    A couple of years ago, my sister emailed me pictures of a storybook that my niece, Molly, wrote for a second grade school project.  It was a story about an unnamed boy and girl – but we might as well name them, because it was clear to me that the girl was the author and the boy was her brother Danny! The boy and the girl were having a discussion, and later an argument, about what they wanted to be when they grew up.  At some point, they were called to dinner, and the table was set with their favorite meal: pizza and fries.  They both enjoyed the meal and cleaned their plates and the boy said, “I want more.”  He didn’t get more, of course, but the girl did, because she asked nicely and thanked her mother. Then she told her brother, “Use your manners.”  The really scandalous part of this exchange is that I’ve heard the real girl demand more at the table without using her manners on more than one occasion!

    That little story provides a rich framework for what I want to talk about today, and it’s an interesting illustration of today’s Gospel reading. That reading is scandalous too, because it seems that nine believers – people who should know how to be grateful to God – failed to express their gratitude over a miracle that literally gave them back the life that leprosy took away from them. It’s almost unthinkable.  Maybe we can cut them a little slack, because when you look closely at the story, Jesus really didn’t say or do anything indicative of healing – all he did was say “Go show yourselves to the priests.”  Now, it was the priests’ job to take care of ritual purity, but I’m guessing they had seen priests about their illness in the past and obviously had not been healed.  So I can see how they would have been confused, frustrated, and maybe even a little angry at Jesus’ response.  But they absolutely could not have been confused about the fact that they had been healed.  And yet the only one who thought to give thanks and praise to God was the other guy, a Samaritan – a foreigner and a religious outcast who wasn’t expected to know the religious etiquette that one should follow.

    Maybe the most deeply scandalous part of this whole reading is not just that nine lepers forgot to thank Jesus. I think the most scandalous part of this Gospel is that it really can be a kind of mirror of our own society, and perhaps even our own lives. Because these days gratitude is not a common occurrence; more often our society gets caught up in entitlement – we deserve blessings, we have a right to grace and mercy. Just as we think we have a right to everything in the whole world, we lay claim to God’s grace in ways that are deeply scandalous and even more than a little heretical.

    Just like those ten lepers had no right to lay claim to Jesus’ healing powers, so we too have no right to lay claim to his grace and mercy. Those things do not belong to us, and even more than that we are quite unable to earn them, even if we had a desire to earn them in the first place. But here’s the really great thing that shatters the scandal: even though the lepers had no right to be healed, Jesus healed them anyway. Even though we have no right to God’s grace and forgiveness for our many sins, he gives those things to us anyway, without a thought of doing otherwise. As the saying goes, God is good, all the time.

    And so the message today is that we have to decidedly leave behind our attitudes of entitlement and embrace an attitude of gratitude. And honestly, I think that can make us happier people. Grateful people live differently.  Grateful people look for the blessing in every moment, they hunt for the grace constantly at work in their lives.  They are like radios which are powered on so that they can receive the broadcast.  When you’re grateful, it’s amazing how much more you seem to be blessed.  Only it’s not necessarily that you’re blessed more; instead it’s that you’re more aware of the blessing.  Thankful people are happier with their lives, because they’re simply more aware of what God is doing, how God is leading them, and they feel the touch of God’s hand leading them through life.  Being grateful is a choice, but it’s a choice worth making, it’s a choice that makes our lives richer and more beautiful every day.

    As Catholics, we are a people who, at least liturgically, constantly choose to be grateful.  Our Eucharist – which, as we know, is the Greek word for thanksgiving – is the Thanksgiving feast par excellence.  Every time we gather to celebrate Mass, we remember that God in his infinite mercy sent his only Son to be our Savior.  He came into our world and walked among us, filling the earth with his most merciful presence.  He journeyed among us, a man like us in all things but sin.  His great love led him to bear the cross for our sake, dying the death we so richly deserved for our many sins.  And then he did the greatest thing possible: he burst out of the grave, breaking the chains of death, and rose to new life.  Because of this grace, we have the possibility of everlasting life with God, the life we were created for in the first place.

    Every time we celebrate the Eucharist, we remember this awesome mystery.  Not only that, our Eucharist brings us to the hour of that grace, giving us once again a share in its blessing.  As a Eucharistic people, we Catholics are a people of gratitude.  That’s what defines us.

    So how would a people defined by gratitude celebrate this Thanksgiving day?  Certainly we have made the best possible start: gathering for the Eucharist to give thanks for the presence of God and the grace he pours out on us.  Then we take that grace to our families’ own Thanksgiving feasts and beyond.  As we gather around the table today, maybe we can stop to reflect on God’s magnificent presence in our lives – in good times and in bad.  And then use that gratitude to make the world an awesome place – or at least your corner of it!

    So we’re not like those nine lepers that somehow missed the grace and blessing that was happening right before their eyes. On this day, we gather because we choose to be grateful. On this day, before all the turkey and stuffing and pumpkin pie, we stand up and bear witness that our God is good all the time, that there is grace and blessing all around us, and we can see it if we choose to do so. We grateful ones come into this holy place to show a watching world that we are who we say we are – a people of Eucharist – of thanksgiving not just on this day, but every day. And we proclaim to the world that gratitude is the antidote for entitlement, and it’s an attitude that can make the world a more blessed place. Like the pilgrims on that first Thanksgiving, our gratitude can become the source of our survival through the hard times and the source of our joy in the good times.  May we never cease offer our gratitude to God, singing to him our songs of thanks and praise.

  • Monday of the Thirty-third Week of Ordinary Time

    Monday of the Thirty-third Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    Right at the end of today’s first reading is one of the most chilling lines in all of Scripture: “and they did die.”  The people’s faith was sorely tested: would they give in and worship the false gods of the people around them so that they could have some kind of peace and security, or would they prefer to stand up for what they believed and more likely than not, give their lives for their faith?  Many gave up and gave in and worshipped the false gods.  But many stood their ground and clung to their belief in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

    But, let’s be clear about this: they all died.  In some way.  Those who were martyred literally gave their lives for the faith, we get that.  But those who chose to give up and give in brought about the death of their culture and the death of their souls.  Sure, they may have had some kind of peace and security now, but who would protect them if the people they allied themselves with were overtaken?  And that is to say nothing of their eternal souls.  They did die.

    The persecution never ends.  It would be easier in our own day to give in and accept abortion as a necessity, or to change Church teaching on the nature of marriage and the family, or to accept whatever special interest groups think is best for us, or keep our faith private and never share it or show it in any way.  Our culture would like that; they would appreciate our willingness to blend in and not give offense.  But that would be the death of our way of life and our spirituality.  It will surely cost us to witness to our faith, to challenge co-workers when a business deal blurs the lines of morality, to insist that our children attend Church on Sunday before they go to a weekend-long soccer tournament, or whatever the challenge may be.

    But better that we die a little for our faith than that we die without faith at all.

  • For All the Saints

    For All the Saints


    Today is the feast that always brings to mind one of my favorite hymns: “For All the Saints.” Whenever we sing it, I just get a little glimpse of what the heavenly worship might be like on that great day when God brings all things into one, and the last enemy is conquered!

  • Saturday of the Twenty-sixth Week of Ordinary Time

    Saturday of the Twenty-sixth Week of Ordinary Time

    During the summer before my final year of seminary, I worked as a hospital chaplain.  It ended up being a pretty rough summer for me and the other men and women in the student chaplain group: we had a record number of deaths and tragic accidents to deal with, and it was, as you might expect, getting us pretty down.  Then for morning prayer one day, one of my fellow students brought in today’s Gospel, and we reflected especially on the end part of the reading:

    “Blessed are the eyes that see what you see.
    For I say to you,
    many prophets and kings desired to see what you see,
    but did not see it,
    and to hear what you hear, but did not hear it.”

    The more we explored that reading, the more we became aware that, even in the midst of all of the very real tragedy we were experiencing, we were also experiencing some very real great blessing.  How true that is for all of us in life.  We tend to dwell on the negative things we are seeing, and no one would ever doubt that we all have to see some pretty rotten stuff in our lives, some people it seems more so than others.  But the problem comes when we let go of the blessing that comes too.  We people of faith have to be convinced that God is with us even in, perhaps especially in, our darkest moments, and gives us glimpses of the kingdom of God that perhaps others don’t get to see.  Blessed are our eyes when we get to see them!

    The people in Moses’ day didn’t ever really get to see God.  They got to see Moses, who sort of acted as an intermediary for them with God.  No one else could see God and live.  But our eyes do get to see God.  We can see God in the Eucharist, we can see God in the person sitting next to us, we can see God in the graced moments of our day.  Maybe we just need to open our eyes to see God more often, but he is there, longing to bless our eyes with the vision of him.

  • Friday of the Fourth Week of Easter

    Friday of the Fourth Week of Easter

    Today’s readings
    Mass for the school children.

    One of the most important things we can ever learn is that God loves us very much.  God created us because of love: if he didn’t love us, he never would have made us, because God never makes anything that he doesn’t love.  God is love, and so God can’t do anything other than love us.

    Unfortunately, we can sometimes do something other than love God.  He gave us free will, and sometimes that’s a problem.  Sometimes that’s a challenge.  God freely chose to love us, and so he wants us to freely choose to love him.  But, because we have free will, sometimes we don’t do that.  There are lots of things out there that we often choose to love instead: we might love things, choosing to care about the nice things we own rather than about other people or about our relationship with God.  We might even choose to do things that turn us away from God, like following the crowd and doing things we shouldn’t, like bullying others, that kind of thing.

    And the problem is, it’s easy to get distracted from God’s love.  There are lots of people that try to get us to go the wrong way.  It might be a commercial that convinces us that we have to have something we really don’t need.  It could be someone who is trying to get us to try drugs or alcohol.  It could be a person who tells us we’re ugly, or dumb, or just not a good person.  All these voices are wrong, but we hear them so often, it’s hard sometimes to find God in all the confusion.

    But there is a way.  And that’s what today’s Gospel is all about.  Because God loves us, he wants us to find our way back to him.  He wants us to hear that he is still there, that he still loves us, even among all those voices that confuse us sometimes.  He made us out of love, and he wants us to return to him one day and share eternal life with him.  And when life confuses us and tries to convince us that we aren’t worthy of God’s love, he gives us Jesus.  Jesus is the way, the truth and the life.  He is the one way back to the Father.

    And that’s good news, because we know Jesus, don’t we?  We know that we can find him in our lives and especially here at Mass.  We can be with Jesus as we hear the words of the readings, and as we come to receive him in Holy Communion.  We don’t need all kinds of useless “stuff.”  We don’t need drugs or alcohol or anything else.  We are not ugly or dumb or unlovable.  We are made by God who makes all things good and makes all of us out of love.  All we need is Jesus who wants more than anything for us to know that God loves us.  Jesus is the way, the truth and the life.  Don’t ever forget that.  Don’t ever take your eyes off Jesus.

  • Monday of the Thirty-fourth Week of Ordinary Time

    Monday of the Thirty-fourth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    “Lord, this is the people that longs to see your face.”

    The Psalmist, as he often does, helps us to express what’s in our hearts in these closing days of the Church year.  All of our spiritual journeying through the year has been, or at least it should have been, with the goal of seeing God’s face one day in eternity.  That, says the Psalmist, is the reward of blessing for which the sinless, clean-hearted one waits.

    John’s Revelation in the first reading is the vision that continues to promise this great reward.  Here John gets a peek at the heavenly glory, that glory at which the hundred and forty-four thousand stand in awe.  Not that God limits reward to a mere hundred and forty-four thousand souls, but it’s supposed to represent a huge number, and the number is symbolic.  Twelve was a number that represented the whole known world: twelve being all of the tribes of Israel, if you recall.  So it’s the number of tribes in the world, times twelve, times a thousand!  A huge number that almost no one can count.

    As the spiritual song goes, we sure want to be in that number.  And so as the year comes to a close, we must take stock of how close we are to seeing God’s face.  If our longing for heavenly reward has not been our number one priority this year, then it’s time to get serious in the year ahead.  There are any number of earthly rewards that are nice to have.  But they will all pass away.  Only heavenly glory will give us eternal happiness, and we need to strive with all our heart and soul to get it.

    The coming of Advent next week gives us the opportunity to repent of our sins, to work on our prayer and spiritual lives, to reach out to the needy, to do everything we can to seek God’s face, that is, to strengthen our relationship with him.  We need to be longing to put habits in place that will lead us to God’s grace.  We need to be longing to create a spirit in ourselves that leads us to peace with others.  We need to be longing to see God’s face.  Because no other reward is as wonderful as that!

  • The Word from Father Pat

    The Word from Father Pat

    How could we sing the song of the LORD
    in a foreign land?
    Psalm 137

    Dear brothers and sisters in Christ,

    This quote from Psalm 137 may seem like a quaint reminiscence from history, but I think it is actually a foundational aspiration of the spiritual life, and as such, a worthy aspiration for Lent.

    One of the important principles of this life is that we are not home yet; we are wayfarers in this world.  Our life is a journey back to our God who made us for himself, and, as Saint Augustine says so well, “our hearts are restless until they rest in thee (God).”  And so it is with a great sense of longing, and perhaps a little frustration, that the psalmist cries out, “How could we sing the song of the LORD in a foreign land?”

    For the Jews, the place for true worship was the Temple in Jerusalem.  And so, when they were exiled to Babylon, not only did they lose their homes and their land, but also, in a sense, their relationship with God.  They could not have true worship in a foreign land, so no matter how much they were urged to do so by their captors, they couldn’t sing the Lord’s song.

    For us, the experience is different of course, but in some ways also similar.  We too are not where we should be, and please God, not where we will be.  We are on this journey we call life, and we long to bring that journey along side the road our God lays out for us to lead us back to him.  That way has us travel, particularly during Lent, along the Way of the Cross.  We know that there is so much that we have to scourge out of us, nail to the cross and die to.  But it’s easier not to journey along that road.

    And so we follow other paths.  These lead us far away from where we were made to be.  They put us in that foreign land that is so far from the kingdom God promised us.  This land is so filled with distractions that we rarely have time to think of God, let alone worship him in spirit and truth.  And so it would be well for our souls to cry out, “How could we sing the song of the LORD in a foreign land?”

    Lent is an opportunity for the journey back.  There is nowhere we can go that is beyond the reach of our God.  All we have to do is take his hand and be pulled up out of the waters that engulf us, be pulled back to the right path and take up the journey once again.  It won’t be an easy journey; it never is for people of faith.  Jesus had to experience his Good Friday before he came to Easter Sunday, and so will we in this life.  But we never have to travel this road alone.

    If you’ve found that Lent hasn’t been what you hoped it would be, it’s not too late to take our Lord’s hand and head the right way.  There is still time for fasting, almsgiving and prayer, and no matter how late it may be, these will still be food for our journey.  This week we have our parish mission, with opportunity for confession after the mission on Monday and Tuesday.  It is my prayer that you will find this week a helpful one if you need to turn your Lent around.

    And may we all one day together sing the Lord’s song in the Land he has made for us!

    Yours in Christ and His Blessed Mother,
    Father Pat Mulcahy

  • The Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary II (School Mass)

    The Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary II (School Mass)

    Mass for the school children.

    I think we’re so blessed that we get to come to church and celebrate so many of Mary’s feasts.  Today is a very special feast because Mary, Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, is the patroness of the United States of America, and so she is very special to us.  This is so special a feast for us that this day is a Holy Day of Obligation every single year; the only other holy day that is always a Holy Day of Obligation is Christmas.  So this is a very special day!

    I think today’s readings can be a little confusing.  The Gospel makes it sound like this day is about the conception of Jesus, but it isn’t.  We celebrate the conception of Jesus nine months before he was born, so somebody do the math … that would be March 25th, right?  We call that day the Annunciation, because that was the day the Angel Gabriel came to announce to Mary that she would have a baby, but we’ll talk more about that in a minute.  Today we celebrate the conception of Mary, nine months before her birthday, so if you do the math on that one, her birthday is September 8th, just a few months ago.  This day celebrates that Mary was free from sin from the very beginning, the only person other than Jesus not to have sin.

    The other confusing reading is the first one.  Why do we go all the way to the beginning of creation when we’re talking about Mary today?  Well, I think the reason is that Mary solved a problem that began all the way at the beginning.  And that problem was sin.  From the very beginning, we human beings have been tempted to sin.  Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the forbidden tree in the Garden of Eden, and people have been committing sin ever since.  Again and again, God broke in to history, leading people back to him, giving them prophets to show them the way, and again and again, people turned away from God.  And we continue that today.  Again and again, we are tempted and we sin and we turn away from God.

    But God didn’t want that to be the way things ended up for us.  So he sent his Son to become one of us, and we are preparing to celebrate his birth during this Advent season.  God knew that in order for Jesus to be born among us, his mother was going to have to be pretty special.  So before Mary was ever in her mother’s womb, God chose her to be his Son’s mother.  He made her free from sin so that no stain of sin would ever touch his Son while he was in his mother’s womb.

    Because Mary was so special, she loved God very much.  So when the angel came and told her she would have a baby by the power of the Holy Spirit, she said yes to God’s plan.  I don’t know if she really understood what was going to happen, I don’t know if she really knew how this wonderful event would take place, and she probably didn’t fully understood what would happen to Jesus in his life, but she said yes anyway.  We call that her fiat, her “yes” to God’s plan for her.  She took a big leap of faith that day, and we have been blessed ever since.

    This is all very good news.  But there is even more good news: because Mary was so special to God, she shows us how special we are to God.  As we celebrate God’s love for Mary today, we can also celebrate his love for us.  Mary got to hold her Savior – the One God promised us – in her own arms.  When those of us who are old enough come to Communion today, we will be able to hold our Savior – the One God promised us – in the palm of our hand.  Mary’s life was brightened when Jesus was born.  Our lives will be brightened too, this coming Christmas, and every time when we make room in our hearts for Jesus.

    Winter can be a dark and cold time.  And we can also see darkness in the world through crime and hate, and sometimes we can even feel coldness in our own hearts.  But Advent reminds us, with the help of special people like Mary, that God will keep his promises and send us a Savior to brighten our world and warm up our hearts.  Just as Mary was chosen and special before she was even in her mother’s womb, so we are chosen and special to God from the beginning too.  God loves us so much that he sent his Son to free us from our sins and lead us home one day to him.  Praise God for his great love and for the ways he comes into our hearts!

    Pray for us, O holy Mother of God, that we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.  Amen.