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Christmas Eyes

12/31/2014

Christmas Eyes

Dear old and new friends,

Skyrockets, church bells ringing and the fireworks of New Year’s Eve overshadow the few remaining reminders that still exist of Christmas. Dark now are homes and store buildings once brightly outlined in lights, as bedraggled Christmas trees devoid of tinsel and decorations sit on the curb awaiting trash pickup. Emotionally, Christmas feels a long way back…yet it was only a week ago! Miraculously it can be easily recalled, and now devoid of all the Yuletide garish garlands the authentic Christmas can actually be more dynamically soul energizing.

A meaningful memory of Christmas can be yours in the following days of this coming New Year each time you write the four numbers of Anno Domino 2015! Dionysius Exiguus, a monk in 525, invented this dating system based on the birth of Christ—the first Christmas! A.D. (for Anno Domino) before the year became widely used in Europe around 800 and continued being used in the Gregorian calendar, and now is used by the United Nations and the Universal Postal Union. The years before the birth of Christ are signified by use of B.C. (Before Christ) which officially follows the date. According to a consensus of scholars Dionysius Exiguus was mistaken in his calculations and the actual historical date of the birth of Jesus was 6-4 B.C. Since our modern world includes billions who are not Christians, or even religious, today the initials C.E. (for Common Era) are used instead of A.D., and B.C.E. for B.C.

As was said at the beginning of this refection, without the shopping and hectic activities of December 25th that awesome Mystery we commemorate on Christmas can be more dynamically enriching. Christmas commemorates God becoming one in flesh in Jesus of Nazareth…and also with all humanity, all creation and all the measureless vastness of the Cosmos. Look up at the night stars—and beyond to the countless galaxies—with Christmas eyes and see the Presence of your Mysterious God. Look with Christmas eyes not just on evergreens but all trees and shrubs and see the Divine Creator within. Look with Christmas eyes upon friend and stranger, upon alien and family member, and see your Beloved Lord.

Each time in the coming days you write the New Year date 2015, don’t dash it off quickly, but deliberately write out those four numbers. Pause to look with Christmas eyes at them for a mini-moment to allow the meaning of God’s Investing of Self in all matter to fill your heart so you can taste the joy of a real Christmas.

Happy New Year C.E. Anno Domino 2015

Anticipating Christmas - Fourth Week

12/24/2014

Anticipating Christmas ~ Fourth Week

Dear old and new friends,

Today’s Christmas is domesticated and tamed…but the first one was wild, lacking kindly toy-making elves and flying reindeer. It was also frightening as Bethlehem’s silent night was shattered with loud agonizing cries of pain, the same ones heard at every birth! No heavenly chorus of singing angels soothed that birthing anguish we celebrate on this Christmas—so don’t expect them at yours!

Birthing? What are you talking about? It’s impossible; I’m too old to be born again. Besides once is enough! Yet vast are the spiritual depths for our Christmas meditation in the First Letter of John, 4:7-8: “Everyone who loves is born of God…for God is love.”

To unravel this mystical puzzle, let’s begin by reviewing our loves. First, we learned how to love as infants by being loved by our parents, then this love evolved into a wider love of members of our immediate family and relatives. Outside our family, our first real love perhaps was a sexual, erotic one that began a new relationship with another that was intended to evolve into the beautifully, supportive love of companionship. Of falling in love, the former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt said, “Once you get over falling in love, you can really begin to love.” Yes, after those high octane mind-blowing experiences you must learn to love with such great strength so as to withstand infidelity of all types, along with your physical aging and that of your lover, so your love can evolve into a greater, divine love.

God is all of these kinds of human loves, yet God’s love is different. That author of John’s first letter said, “God is love,” yet left unspoken what that loves is! Divine love is radically different in that it is not attracted by physical beauty or charm and loves effortlessly the disfigured and ugly. God’s love is free. It can’t be purchased or manipulated, and it never requires any thanks, not even the natural response of being loved in returned.

To love as does God requires a dedication to the evolution of all of our previous ways of loving, and so naturally must include the birthing pains of evolution. Your spirit will scream out in pain when this new loving calls you to lift a soiled, stinking, perhaps diseased person out of the gutter. Inwardly your soul will wail in agony as you continue to love one who returned your years of loving kindness with hostility and stony silence. Your spirit will howl with a birthing burst of anguished pain when you respond with loving kindness to those who dislike you, who speak lies and spread malicious gossip about you.

Love like this day after day and you will be born of God, just as Jesus, born of Mary, was born of God to become Living Mystical Love among us. When you love as God does, all of Heaven rejoices and sends out the joyous announcements of your new birth!

Anticipating Christmas ~ Third Week

12/17/2014

Anticipating Christmas ~ Third Week

Dear old and new friends,

In the breathtaking splendor of our evolving universe ever birthing new star-furnaces and constructing new planets from the dust of death stars is melodically heard that old Christmas carol, Venite, adoremus—Come, let us adore! From the earliest millenniums humans have felt that compelling urge to prostrate themselves in adoration before the wondrous in their lives…the inexplicability of dancing fire, the zigzagging bolts of lightning or the awesome birthing of a child. Religion’s appearance provided adoration of the gods and goddesses in sacred caves, and later in temples. Then simple humans, when they became Kings, cleverly used this primal desire by making it a ritual befitting them.

Today rare are the opportunities to express that primordial instinct to adore. Yet when walking down a city sidewalk that innate urge is awakened by store loud speakers playing the carol’s call, Venite, adoremus! No need to rush into the nearest church to bow or kneel; just open your eyes! This call to adore is appropriate when city buildings and homes are outlined in strings of glittering colored lights. When trees bare of leaves are dazzling with clouds of twinkling white lights as if small galaxies were nesting in their branches, we can respond, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God!” (as wrote Gerald Manley Hopkins). This holy magnificence, while present every day, is made more apparent in this Christmas season of lights. Let us strive to pray every day, not just on those of December, with Christmas-tide eyes so to see the common and ordinary electrified with the splendor of God’s Presence.

We are anticipating Christmas, the Feast of the Incarnation…of God assuming human flesh along with all of its emotions and implications, including death. This winter feast celebrates God’s consecration of creation, saying Hoc est Corpus Meum, which his Bethlehem-born son at his Last Supper echoes over bread, This is My Body! We constantly struggle to comprehend the profound implications for us of Christmas’s incarnation that absolutely nothing in this world is profane or secular!

The priest, paleoanthropologist, poet and prophet, Teihard de Chardin, wrote in his Divine Milieu, “By means of all created things, without exception, the divine assails us, penetrates us and molds us. We imagined it as distant and inaccessible, whereas in fact we live steeped in its burning layers…the world, this palpable world, which we were wont to treat with the boredom and disrespect with which we habitually regard places with no sacred association for us, is in truth a holy place (emphasis mine), and we did not know it. Venite, adoremus.”

Let chiming Christmas bells awaken us from our relentless slumber to embrace the reality that we live truly in a wonderland, a world electrified and charged with the Divine Grandeur. So aroused, let us with Braille belief daily greet this world with adoration’s other meanings: passionate loving and wonder-filled admiration.

Anticipating Christmas ~ Second Week

12/10/2014

Anticipating Christmas ~ Second Week

Dear old and new friends,

I was shocked by a recent survey revealing that a third of Catholics did not believe in a personal God! Searching for an explanation, I wondered how worship or prayer might shape our relationship with God. For example, what type of God is created addressing our prayers to “Lord,” a title once restricted to the Roman Emperor? And how does Catholic worship which is the Roman Rite Mass—the Eucharist—influence an idea of God? It now is in English, but other than for some adjustments is the same solemn Roman ritual from the reforms following the 1563 Council of Trent…71 years after Columbus came to the New World! Catholics urgently need a new 21st Century “Living” Eucharist reflective of a personal God, our evolving ecumenical unity and our world in an ever-expanding universe seen in the awesome photographs of the Hubble space telescope.

In anticipating Christmas, we commemorate the anniversary of the birth of Jesus Christ whose teachings reinforced the Great Commandment, “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your strength.” Do our present spirituality and prayers reflect our striving for or experiencing a totality of loving of God? Christian scriptures use several words for worship/prayer. The most frequent of these, used some 66 times, is the Greek proskyneo. This Greek term means an act of submission or adoration, and surprisingly the very intimate, “I come toward to kiss”…and, logically, to be kissed! Imagine the impact on your spirituality if you began your prayers with such an intimate request!

We are born with an innate desire for intimacy with others—and God! Yet we also dread closeness to the Divine Mystery. So we fill up our worship with endless words, songs and music, and in our personal devotions by the use of predictable rote prayers that shield us from vulnerable intimacy. As our mothers kissed the hurt away from a childhood bruised knee, so let the Holy Loved One kiss away our fears of intimacy. Let your love grow by addressing God as, “My Beloved” or “Dearly Beloved.” Then eagerly put flesh on your affectionate words by loving acts of kindness to strangers and friends. The best prayer for these Anticipation Days is just to sit, close your eyes to the season’s whirling hurrying and be in silence with your Beloved. Lovers hunger to be alone together; so still your anxious heart as is prescribed in Psalm 46:10, “Be still and confess that I am God.”

Upon opening your eyes “confess” that everywhere you look and everything you see is your Divine Beloved! The old God of the starry heavens above no longer exists! Your dearly beloved Creator has poured, and is pouring, the Divine in abundance into all earthly creation, into the hundreds of billions of star-crammed galaxies in our ever-expanding universe and in all other possible universes in space.

“Venite adoremus”—come, let us adore!

Anticipating Christmas ~ First Week

12/3/2014

Anticipating Christmas ~ First Week

Dear old and new friends,

This first week of December begins the age old four weeks of anticipating Christmas, the largest, most flamboyant celebration in our country. It is paradoxical in our secular culture that the holy feast of the birth of Jesus Christ is the busiest shopping season of the year. Christians struggle not to let their Christmas be marginalized by this holiday’s powerful secular forces. Yet struggle not, for wondrously the secular and sacred, the entire world and the cosmos are fused as one in Christmas, the Incarnation of Jesus, for indeed “Emmanuel is here…God is with us.”

So in decorating your home you are simultaneously decorating your heart; purchasing Christmas gifts for family and friends is inseparable from loving them. The rabbi teacher Jesus of Galilee creatively fused together as one the ancient Jewish law of Deuteronomy 6, “You shall love your God with all your heart and soul,” with that of Leviticus 19, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” These Anticipation days call us to faithfully observe his two-as-one commandment as we endeavor to love God more by becoming better lovers of our neighbors.

The Hebrew word for neighbor was understood to mean “a fellow member of your clan” or “a fellow member of your social group,” typically limited to one’s acquaintance. In other contexts, it meant not merely an adjoining dweller but the person next to you, the person you meet by chance or the next person in line. We’ve defined neighbor, now we do the same for the love shown to the stranger. It is not same love a wife or husband feel for one another or the love for a friend for whom we have feelings of affection.

Lacking a specific English word, what sums up that unique love is a “loving kindness.” The source of this unique kindness isn’t politeness or good manners. It is a divine love not inspired by physical attractiveness or shown to fulfill any law. You love your neighbor when your reply to a stranger’s aggressive rudeness, or his or her roughly bumping you aside to get a bargain sale item, with loving kindness. It is a sanctified love with global implications, for when it is expressed towards a next door neighbor or an unknown stranger that person is for you the immediate contact point with the entire human community! Showing this divine love touches the web of all life, so no wonder it has such ancient roots.

The finest preparation for Christmas is Kindheartedness since Jesus said when you love your neighbor you loved God! Add its holy cousin Gentleheartedness into your home amidst the season’s chaos. Next add another holy cousin Generousheartedness by your sharing with the needy your bounty. These holy three will guarantee you will have a wondrous Christmas Feast of the Incarnation…divine Love tangible in all creation.

Christmas Eyes

Christmas Eyes

Anticipating Christmas - Fourth Week

Anticipating Christmas ~ Fourth Week

Anticipating Christmas ~ Third Week

Anticipating Christmas ~ Third Week

Anticipating Christmas ~ Second Week

Anticipating Christmas ~ Second Week

Anticipating Christmas ~ First Week

Anticipating Christmas ~ First Week

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