The text of Fr Christopher Gray's homily on January 1st, 2016: The Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God
What
is the measure of a year? The things we’ve done, the places we’ve
been? Or the things we’ve left still to be done, or the promises we
have yet to keep? This last year for me will always be ruled with the
memory of returning to Rome to reengage the academic world, while at
the same time coming to better understand the spiritual value of
authentic friendship. On this point especially, I’m still coming to
grips with a paradox; friendship is something that is
“Not
known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the
stillness…
(costing not less than everything)”
But I
also know that
“[And] all shall be well and
All manner
of thing shall be well”
Because even if
“We shall not
cease from exploration
[And] the the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for
the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When
the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the
beginning.”
(c.f. Little Gidding, TS Eliot);
for all of
us there have been births, marriages, funerals, graduations—closings
and new beginnings. This evening we closed the Year of the Lord 2015;
we gather to give thanks for the many graces we have received even as
we look forward to what this new year has to offer.
And
it has quite a lot! The visions and revisions of what even just today
may present to us will spin round and round even until after this day
fades into the next day and the next. How slippery a thing time is,
and how vaporous our plans for it! When the shepherds made haste to
see the newborn Christ, none of them thought that either the
appearance of angels they had just experienced was an everyday
experience or that they knew precisely what they would find in
Bethlehem when they got there. It’s a startling challenge to
us—Although we have the benefit of having already heard the news of
the birth of Christ and everything that happened thereafter, maybe
not often enough do our hearts or footsteps quicken to find Him where
we know He will be. Maybe this could even be something we could work
on for the new year: Renewed excitement in our love for the Lord!
How do we invigorate our relationship with God? By
spending time with Him and opening our Hearts to Him. How do we find
Him? We find the Lord in the Blessed Sacrament in any Catholic
Church; we find the Lord in His Holy Spirit at work in the lives of
all around us; We find the Lord in His work of creation, in Sacred
Scripture, and whenever we gather in His name, so long as we have
real integrity and purity of heart. How easy it is to find the same
Lord the Angels announced and the shepherds ran to see!
We
hear in the Gospel that “Mary held all these things in her heart,”
a mysterious phrase about how the Blessed Virgin pondered the
marvelous events from the time when Gabriel first gave her the
message that she would conceive and be the mother of the Messiah, to
the accounts of the shepherds and everyone else, to the message of
the prophets she had unlocked, and peering in, had seen herself. The
prime witness to the Incarnation of God, she would not divulge these
thoughts to anyone, but instead, Luke tells us, “held all these
things in her heart” where their spiritual reality enveloped
everything about her. There’s another great example for us here as
we consider our new year—what do we hold in our hearts? Things that
will last an hour or a day, or things that are worthy for a lifetime
or, better, for an eternity?
Time passes and does not
return. God has assigned to each of us a definite time in which to
fulfill His divine plan for our soul; we have only this time and no
more. Time spent poorly is lost forever. Our life is made up of this
uninterrupted, continual flow of time, which never returns. In
eternity, on the other hand, time will be no more; we will be
unendingly, forever, in the degree of love which we have reached now,
in time. If we have attained a high degree of love, we will be
forever in that degree of love and glory; if we possess only a slight
degree, that is all we will have forever. Without time, there is no
more progress: In heaven, where there is no time, there is no
progression in love. As St. Paul says to the Galatians: “Therefore,
while we have time, let us work good to all people” (Gal 6:10). One
holy Carmelite nun once said: “We must give every moment its full
amount of love, and make each passing moment eternal, by giving it
value for eternity” (Sr. Carmela of the Holy Spirit OCD).
What
a fascinating statement! This is the best way to use the time given
us by God. Charity, love, allows us to adhere to God’s will with
submission and love, and so at the close of life we will have
accomplished God’s plan for our soul; we will have reached the
degree of love which God expects from each one of us and with which
we will love and glorify Him for all eternity. Everything depends on
love; everything depends on our heart.
How do we fill our
hearts with worthy things? Pray better. How do we pray better? We
follow Mary’s example. Just like our Lady, we worship God with our
words in verbal prayer; Mary’s words in the Gospel are few but
powerful: “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord”; “Do
whatever He tells you.” But “Mary [also] held all these things in
her heart,” showing us how to meditate on God’s presence in our
lives. And whenever she looked at her Son, she contemplated the face
of God; the same is true for us. These are the three modes of prayer
modeled by our Lady: Verbal prayer, meditation, contemplation. Three
small things that open up whole worlds of intimacy with the Lord and
the greatest of joys.
The Blessed Virgin Mary held more
than news of great joy in her heart; she bore our Savior in her womb
and so became the Mother of God. Jesus was Jesus just as much at His
conception
as at His birth
as at His death on the Cross
as at His resurrection,
and so throughout was always Word
of God, God Himself, our Lord, our Redeemer, consubstantial with the
Father and yet also consubstantial with His mother and so with all of
us as well.
Ponder this for a moment. Christ is of the
same stuff as us. For one week now, the Church has been immersed in
the mystery of the Incarnation of Christ, a whole week that has been
the same “most sacred day on which blessed Mary the immaculate
Virgin brought forth the Savior for this world” (Canon). In this
mystery, Christ who is our savior and God, is also like us through
and through, flesh and bones, or, more appropriately for Christmas
and for this holiday, hunger, laughter, crying, wiggling, sleeping,
waking, and all the other things which are natural for newborns. What
we have been celebrating isn’t just that God was born in Bethlehem,
but that Jesus is our brother, who is also the light of the world,
who is also true clarity, true intimacy, true presence, true God. All
of this, and our brother.
For us, since there was no time
when Jesus was not God, it would never enter our minds to worship a
glorified Jesus while merely revering or esteeming a child Jesus. In
the same way, Mary was not the mother of Jesus’ humanity only, but
of Jesus in His fullness; not of a part, but of the whole. So when we
say that Jesus is our brother, we mean something very important: He
is our brother through Mary who is our mother too; He is our brother
through God the Father who is our Father too. He is our brother
because he was born of Mary according to the flesh; He is our brother
because He is the eternal Son, our Creator Who lowered Himself to the
level of a creature. He is our brother because He gave us His mother
as our mother at the foot of the Cross; He is our brother because He
gave us His Father as our Father through His death on the Cross. Our
Lord Jesus Christ is our brother, and so we have been made sharers in
His divinity. Christ is not just a part of the creation of the world,
His glorious incarnation which we celebrate, His glorious coming
again as Judge, but also in every part of our lives. He changed us,
He changes us, He will change us. He saved us, He is saving us, He
will save us. He loved us, He loves us, He will love us. He was made
low for us, He is made low, He will be made low. He was exalted for
us, He is exalted, He will be exalted. For us.
By us. With us.
In us.
What we share with Christ is much more than we can imagine.
All of us here have an outward life and an inward life,
the roles we fill in society and also that part of our being we bring
before the Lord as who we are in ourselves. Remembering that Christ
loves us as a brother, let us enter into this new year not with a
list of resolutions reminding us how to seem to be better, but with
firm resolve to love Christ more and more, to let ourselves be loved
by Christ more and more, and to let this love be the center of our
lives. In a world of change, in a world of comings and goings, only
Christ remains the same yesterday today and always, and it is
Christ’s mark on us that defines us. And what is this mark? What is
the banner of the victorious Lamb? The Cross, the power of love and
the weight of love. Recall the words of the Song of Songs:
“I
sat down under his shadow with great delight,
and his fruit was
sweet to my taste.
He brought me to the banqueting house
And
his banner over me was love.”(Songs 2:3-4)
Indeed we are
in the banqueting house, and the banner over us is the banner of
love. All of us here are brothers and sisters in Christ, mothers and
fathers in Christ, sons and daughters in Christ, friends in Christ,
workers in Christ, worshipers in Christ, and this so that finally
when we sleep in Christ, we may truly live in Christ forever. May
whatever good we do and sufferings we endure cause us to grow in
holiness and so bring us always closer to our Lord, our brother, our
savior, Jesus Christ. This is the goal of all our prayer, and no use
of our time could be better placed.
Just before Mass we
invoked the Holy Spirit to consecrate this year to the Holiness to
which we are called and to implore His divine assistance. Earlier
this evening, last year, we sang the Te Deum, the great hymn of
thanksgiving that was born out of the excitement to be joined with
Christ that St. Augustine felt the night before his baptism. He and
St. Ambrose, according to tradition, stayed up all night composing
this song which has ever since been the definitive Hymn of Praise
that comes from the very heart of the Church. It is not the hymn of
our selfish joy, but rather of our thanksgiving for that faith in
Jesus, in the Holy Spirit, in our Eternal Father which is the glory
of the saints forever. As a model of prayer, with the Te Deum we
accomplish four motions typical to the best kind of prayer:
adoration, contrition, thanksgiving, and supplication. For the first
couple dozen verses we adore Sacred Trinity; near the end we ask for
mercy, the mercy which can only be given by the Just Judge, the mercy
that we do not deserve, the mercy that holds back the judgment that
we do deserve; throughout we give thanks to God, and we pray that our
days may be joined to Him, and that we may forever be guarded from
sin. In the Te Deum we verbally give thanks to God, something so good
to do at the end of the year that it is privileged with a plenary
indulgence under the usual conditions.
Our act of
thanksgiving neither ends nor begins there, but rather is completed
in this Mass as we praise and give thanks to God liturgically,
fulfilling what this is called: Eucharist, the glorious banquet where
the Father with the Son and the Holy Spirit are the true light,
fullness of satisfied desire, eternal gladness, consummate delight,
and perfect happiness for us all. To the Lord who is, who was, and
who is to Come, the eternal Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, be endless
praise now and unto the ages of ages. Amen.
