WEEKDAY HOMILY ADVENT 02 05 – Yr I

The Light of God’s Word – Memorial: St John of the Cross

(Is 48:17-19; Ps 1; Mt 11:16-19)

*******************************************************

Fr. René Fumoleau OMI recounts the story of an elder who commented to him that having faith in God was like driving a car at night. One journeyed without being able to see the destination, because the headlights illuminate just enough of the road to make the journey possible.

Isaiah and the psalmist today combine to provide us with an important message – to let God’s Word light our way through life.

The psalm response promises that those who follow the Lord will have the “light of life.” The psalm goes on to identify the source of that “light of life” as the Word of God. Those who meditate day and night on the law of the Lord will be like trees planted beside a stream, solidly grounded, yielding fruit at all seasons and under all conditions.

Isaiah then reminds us the Lord is our Redeemer who wants to lead us on the way we need to go, to make it through life successfully. Like the psalmist, he encourages us to pay attention to the Word of God, only now in the form of the Commandments of God. He laments that Israel failed to do this, caught up as they were with the false gods of possessions, prestige and power, and so they did not prosper. In fact, just the opposite – their false pride, stubborn self-will and addiction to those false gods led to tragic disaster, culminating in the destruction of the temple and exile in a foreign land.

Basing ourselves on both Isaiah and the psalmist, the lesson for us today is to share in this guiding light of God by letting Jesus, the Word made flesh, be our redeemer, keeping his commandments, and fostering an intimate relationship with him through contemplative prayer.

To allow Jesus to be our redeemer is to allow him to forgive us. Once a Wells Fargo truck door malfunctioned and some of the money it was carrying spilled onto a New Jersey freeway. People risked their lives stopping in heavy traffic to try to collect as many of the bills as they could.

How ironic – Jesus waits to freely give us an infinite treasure of forgiveness leading to a peace and joy no amount of money can buy, yet we resist that offer! All we have to do is be humble and honest, make an inner journey into our own truth of how we have acted out of our undealt with emotions and hurt others, confess our sins, pray for healing of those same emotions, try to make amends, and the eternal life and light of God will be ours at no cost.

The other light God’s word sheds on our path is the Commandments, which can be summarized this way: Love God with our whole being, love all other people as we love ourselves, love one another as Jesus has loved us, and especially, love our enemies by forgiving them from the heart. To live out these Commandments is to live in the light of Christ and also be a source of that light for others.

For the psalmist especially, a third way we can access this light of Christ is through contemplative prayer (described as “meditating on the law of the Lord day and night”). To enter into contemplative prayer is to venture into a very mature kind of prayer seeking to gain nothing – that desires only to remain in God’s presence and soak up God’s transformative light and love.

Susan Rush, former board member of Richard Rohr’s Centre for Action and Contemplation, has a wonderful way of describing the journey into contemplative centering prayer:

“One comes to the practice of Centering Prayer with only one intention—to consent to God’s presence and action within. Because of that intention, commitment to the contemplative journey through a daily practice of Centering Prayer involves more than just setting aside time to pray; it also means opening ourselves up to a conversion of our will and total transformation.

“When we first start Centering most of us are amazed at how busy our minds are. The silence we long for eludes us. We can’t hear God. But as we continue to practice—time and time again letting our thoughts go and returning ever so gently to our intention—we realize that this is all an Ultimate Mystery and requires a graced trust. With committed practice, gradually we are able to embrace the Divine Dwelling within us. There is a knowing, a conviction, that we are with God.

“If we stay faithful to the practice, our false self begins to be dismantled and we live more and more from our center, from that Divine Ground of Being, from our true self. We are transformed. As the beloved Thomas Keating, who spent his life conceptualizing and teaching this prayer form, wrote, ‘By consenting to God’s creation, to our basic goodness as human beings, and to letting go of what we love in this world, we are brought to the final surrender, which is to allow the false self to die and the true self to emerge. The true self might be described as our participation in the divine life manifesting in our uniqueness.’

“I once heard a patient say that her dying process was an ‘ego-ectomy.’ The contemplative life through the practice of Centering Prayer can be an ego-ectomy, too. We come closer to our dying every day of our living, so let us live our lives to the fullest, for God’s sake. Let us do our spiritual practice as if our lives depended on it—because they do. Let us welcome our ego-ectomy through the dismantling of the false self now—in life—in order to experience each day as a sacred gift.”

Rohr adds this thought: “If we do not discover a prayer practice that ‘invades’ our unconscious and reveals what is hidden, we will actually change very little over our lifetime. This was much of the genius of John of the Cross (1542–1591) who, in a highly externalized Spanish Catholicism, spoke from personal experience of darkness, inner journeys, and the shadow self. He was centuries ahead of the modern discovery of the unconscious, and thus many of his fellow Carmelites considered him heretical and dangerous.”

John, whom the Church celebrates today, was born in 1542 at Fontiveros, Spain. He entered the Carmelite community and was ordained in 1567. With the great Carmelite mystic, Teresa of Avila, he worked for the reformation of his order, and helped found the reformed (‘Discalced’) Carmelites. During his life, he suffered much, enduring imprisonment, humiliation and ill-treatment. His writings are both classics of spiritualty and of Spanish literature. His best-known works are The Ascent of Mount Carmel, The Dark Night of the Soul, and The Living Flame of Love. He died in 1591, was canonized in 1726 and proclaimed a Doctor of the Church in 1926.

The Eucharist is our greatest prayer and way of “loving God back.” It also allows Jesus to be our Redeemer by forgiving and healing us, and empowering us to love others as Jesus has loved us.

May our celebration also help us to follow the light of God’s Word by living the commandments and fostering a more intimate relationship with Jesus through contemplative prayer.