Today we end the old year and begin the new year by hearing one of the Blessed Mother’s greatest qualities: to keep the wondrous events that we have been celebrating as the Nativity of our Lord, “reflecting on them in her heart.” This quality of reflecting on life’s events in our hearts is what I think today’s feast calls us to. Reflection is necessary to think more deeply about what God is doing with us, for if we do not reflect, we will be tossed about by life; and we may not survive the tossing.
So, with Mary let is look at where we are as human beings and as persons of faith in her Son.
Part of reflecting on God’s grace in our lives includes an honest read of our times. In my mind there are both negative things happening in our time, things that can endanger faith, and marvelous things that can enliven our hope.
Let’s look first at the things that endanger our faith:
As society is becoming more pluralistic, we are constantly barraged by other thoughts, other opinions, other ideas that can be in conflict with our values and our belief in all that makes up our Catholic faith. Add on to this a loss of having a philosophical foundation, by which critical thinking can happen, and which can provide us with a sense of logic, we are left without a sense of mooring. Any thought has equal value, whether it makes sense or not. Culturally, we are encouraged to think outside the box and experiment with all that life has to offer without regard to the goodness of our options. In this atmosphere evil can run rampant; and is running rampant.
How can a society survive that kills its own babes in the womb? How can a civilization thrive if it attacks its own foundations and seeks for anything else but our “old way of thinking”? How can a society survive if it tinkers by way of social experiments that are making a mess of the foundational unit of society: the family. How can the future be ensured if whole nations are deciding to commit demographic suicide?
And how long can nations last that are delaying paying its bills and laying them on the backs of their children and their children’s children?
On the positive side, and we Christians must always remain hopeful, there are these exciting things happening:
We are closely reaching a universal access to all of human thought, now so easily accessed through the internet. This is begetting a massive new wave of knowledge. The opportunities here are beyond imagining. Of course values will be shaken by so much cross-pollination.
But as values are being shaken, all over the world, we have the promise of Jesus Christ that He will be with us all days, even unto the end of the world. In time, the Gospel will be victorious with its summons to justice and peace and order; because there will come a time when people will demand these things that the Gospel gives. People can live only so long in a state of chaos.
I see the beginnings of this desire for what the Gospel gives in the new way religious education is being done today. In the past, and until very recently, religious education was a matter of transmitting information, doctrines, head-knowledge to children. The result, though, has been a sense of religion as a list of do’s and don’t’s, without the heart-knowledge of the Lord. Both are needed, but in the past the heart-knowledge was presumed. It can no longer be presumed. People need to know the Lord directly through their own experience. And this is today what religious education is now attempting to do.
Reflecting in our hearts upon our lives, as Mary reflected upon the events of the Incarnation, we have something to offer that people nowadays are being painfully deprived of.
And what is it that we can offer that the world is craving? Hope! As baffling as things may seem, our faith tells us that when we feel lost, confused, adrift, there is indeed One who saves us, the very same One whose birthday we celebrated a week ago, who came among us for the exact purpose of saving us from all of our woes, the very same one who came walking on the water in a terrible storm, asking, “Why are you so afraid?”
This is how Mary was able to withstand the chaos of her time when a threatened king sent out his troops to kill every male child in Bethlehem under the ages of two years old. She had faith in God above all, but faith also in Joseph who told her he had a dream that insisted that they leave in the middle of the night to flee for their lives to Egypt.
I suspect that everyone, as they grow older, thinks the oncoming generation has lost something essential; and it’s not good. I suggest that thinking this way is not being faithful to the promise of the Lord to be with us all days, even unto the end of the world. Happy New Year! Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and the hour of our death. Amen.
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