HOMILY OCTAVE OF CHRISTMAS JANUARY 02
Faith and Fellowship:
Memorial of Saints Basil the Great and Gregory Nazianzen
(1 Jn 2:22-28; Ps 98; Jn 1:19-28)
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Can you think of a friendship that changed your life?
The reading today from 1 John, and the memorial of St. Basil the Great and St. Gregory Nazianzen, invite us into an always deeper and more intimate relationship with God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
It is probable that most of us can look back and feel gratitude for a friendship that has positively influenced us, and perhaps even changed our lives. I think back to a Chinese student at university who challenged me to have my own philosophy of life, a Norwegian Up With People cast member who taught me to pray spontaneously, a former priest who befriended me during a low period of my life, and a religious sister who became a life-long soul mate during an Oblate renewal program. All of these, and others, had a major impact on my life.
Today’s memorial of Saints Basil and Gregory offers us an extraordinary example of genuine friendship in the Lord. Both men were born in the province of Cappadocia in Asia Minor about 330 AD. Both loved learning, were named bishops, fought against the Arian heresy, were great orators, and both were named doctors of the Church. Here is how Gregory describes their friendship.
“Our studies were 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. The same hope inspired us: the pursuit of learning. This is an ambition especially subject to envy. Yet between us there was no envy. On the contrary, we made capital out of our rivalry. Our rivalry consisted, not in seeking the first place for oneself, but in yielding it to the other, for we each looked on the other’s success as his own. We seemed to be two bodies with a single spirit.
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 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 achievement. But our great pursuit, the great name we wanted, was to be Christians, to be called Christians.”
As great as our friendships might have been, or still are, and that of Basil and Gregory was – all of this pales before the intimate loving relationship we are to have with the Trinity that Saint John is describing in the first reading. He tells us that the Son is in the Father, and the Father is in the Son. I would add that the Holy Spirit, or anointing, is the bond of love between the Father and the Son. In short, God is love, one, intimacy, unity, relationship and family.
More than that, St. John invites us to abide in that relationship so we will experience eternal life, that very same life of the Trinitarian relationship of Father, Son and Spirit. Richard Rohr, in his book The Divine Dance, shares that dynamic Trinitarian image of God as an eternal flow of love from one to the other. André Rublev, in his painting of the visit of the Trinity to Abraham and Sarah, painted a small mirror in the front of the picture to indicate we are the fourth part of that eternal divine dance that is our God. A question we can and should ask ourselves is – what is the quality of my relationship with the Father, Jesus and the Holy Spirit?
St. John tells us that if what we have heard from the beginning abides in us, then we will abide in the Son and in the Father and experience eternal life, that divine life of God within us. One of the best ways to allow God’s word to abide in us is to practice Lectio Divina, or holy reading. We read a passage of God’s word; meditate on it and ask ourselves what is God saying to us through this word right here and now; use that word of God to pray for our needs and the needs of the world, and finally, set it all aside and just be present to God who is Father, Son and Spirit, allowing God to do whatever God wants to do within us as we stay attentive and open to the stirring of God’s spirit deep within us.
John the Baptist, in the Gospel, is another example of one who was abiding in God and God in him. When asked about his identity, “Who are you?” by the priests and Levites, he did not respond with his name – he relied on the Word of God and responded he was as the prophet Isaiah had said, “I am a voice crying in the wilderness, make straight the way of the Lord.” John’s intimacy with God in prayer allowed him to recognize the one among them whom they did not know or recognize.
The Eucharist is itself a privileged abiding in God – we listen to God’s word, then receive the body and blood of Jesus – a very intimate union with him who gave his life for us.
Our task, like Basil and Gregory, is to also know our identity – not really our name, but Christians who believe in the Lord Jesus as Son of God, and who live out that faith through intimate prayer in God’s presence, and express it especially through intimate trusting relationships with one another.
