Fr. Don’s Weekly Letter ~ 22 December 2024

Dear Good People of Saint Bernadette,

Now, in the middle of the Christmas Mystery, we need to stop for a moment and consider: “What is actually happening here?” Most people are not looking for some kind of theological presentation, although a little knowledge can change your life. Book knowledge is good (and we should be reading what we can), but we can only begin to imagine the immensity of God and his love. Saint Thomas Aquinas, after a life of writing many volumes of theology, realized that all he wrote is “just grass” when compared to the reality, the truth of God. God is ultimately inscrutible, unfathomable, totally other than we are. We are made by him simply in his “likeness” which means we get a glimpse of him in ourselves. What is most important is to look inside our lives, our hearts, and ask what is really happening with me in my life with God and this community?

Most people have an elementary school understanding of God, at best. No wonder the average age of people who have left the Church is 12 years of age...but how can that be, that such a profound decision can be made (or allowed to be made by their parents) without any real reflection or understanding. We can understand God, by the way, by what he has revealed to us in our own existence from him, his Word, and his powerful deeds in human history. These are real and reliable. The problem is that for many, “behold” means we must also explain, but human beings simply don’t have the words sufficient to describe God’s self-revelation or the eyes to endure the infinite horizon of God.

I’m writing this on December 11 due to bulletin printing deadlines, and I want to print (at left) this morning’s first daily Mass reading, from the prophet Isaiah. God has no equal has created the ends of the earth, his knowledge is beyond scrutiny.

So why, then, do we tend to think of him as an equal, or even an adversary, as if we could begin to compare to him in even the smallest sense?

Yet, it is the same prophet Isaiah who is the one who speaks most about the divine redeemer, the Messiah, the suffering servant who will come from God to save us. How do we reconcile these two revelations? Or are we even supposed to? You see, we are trying to apply science, which is merely the human attempt to explain and make sense of that which simply can’t be explained. For this reason we have faith.

We want so badly to think that we are all we need and we can have God all figured out, but we aren’t, and we can’t. And that is okay because that is who God is and who we are, but it doesn’t mean give up. It means go to work on that relationship and try to find the reason why all this is happening.

We are frustrated in our failure to learn how, when we should be focusing on why. Not how Christmas, but why Christmas? And, by extension, not how Eucharist, but why?

Not how God is a friend, a companion, a savior, but why: God is Love Itself. And how unlikely and relatively impossible that would seem from our human perspective!

God is not a being. God is Being Itself.

If God stopped thinking of us we would cease to be.

But God chose to do everything for us because God is Love. Because of his giving us life and of his love, we must go to work rather than give up. (Did you know that in the Greek of Jesus’ time the word for work was “liturgy?”)

So, to become us he became who we are, not who we would like to be. He became a human baby, completely humble, helpless, and absolutely, irresistibly loveable. He reveals to us how he regards us and who we are in the way in which he becomes us in Jesus Christ.

When you look at Jesus in complete poverty in a trough for feeding animals who do you see? Hopefully, I see myself. Also I realize there is a plan because the One whose plan is unfolding is a lot of unknowns, but the one thing certain is that he is Love.

For that reason we must seek humility, we must recognize our helpless and complete dependence on him, our origin in the Holy Spirit and children of our Mother, Mary. We must admit our poverty and our absolute need for God who alone can be our help, and our hope for eternal life, where all will be known, all will be understood, all will be explained. On that day, not now.

The Lord be with you.