12-20 From the Bishop:

When our charity grows into true solidarity, we can light the world

Bishop John Stowe, OFM Conv.

We approach the end of a calendar year that very few people will be sorry to see close, and we have begun a new liturgical year, leading to the celebration of God’s love manifest in the Child Jesus, whose birth brings hope and light. Jesus is the fulfillment of God’s promises and incarnates God’s Word of love. While our Christmas celebrations will be different this year, the event we celebrate remains the same. Perhaps it is more meaningful than ever to remember, Emmanuel, God is with us — he never has and never will abandon us.

As the new liturgical year dawns, we begin reading a different Gospel on Sundays. The Gospel of Mark is believed to be the oldest and is the briefest of the Gospels. With an economy of words, Jesus the Messiah is presented as a man of action whose arrival on the scene changes things. Mark’s Gospel does not include a Nativity story, we will have to turn to Matthew and Luke as we do each year, but Mark does present the Messiah as God in the flesh who scares the demons and the forces of darkness because they know they are overpowered. The Advent season also prepares us for Jesus’ return in glory, and Mark’s advice is typically concise: “Watch!”

Each year as we begin another Advent, we do so with the consolation and hope of knowing that God has come into our world. But each Advent is also an invitation to ponder what it is that we still await. The Messiah has come and shown us the way; God came close to us as a helpless infant who allows us to draw close. We have not always followed the ways indicated by the Messiah, especially as he demonstrates that we are one family with one Father in heaven. The terrible year that we see coming to a close was made worse by ever-growing division over so many matters, even as a pandemic should have brought us into the greater unity needed to survive.

For what do we await this Advent? I think Pope Francis’ encyclical Fratelli Tutti (“Brothers and Sisters All”) provides a particularly appropriate meditation for this time of watching and waiting. The encyclical begins with a gloom and darkness that are appropriate for December’s shorter days, and as our weariness from the pandemic continues to weigh on us. His first chapter is entitled “Dark Clouds over a Closed World,” and he points out how so many efforts at greater unity in the human family in recent decades have seemingly been reversed, all while selfishness and nationalism are on the rise. For all of the talk of globalization and an ever smaller world, the pope notes that we may have become neighbors but do not recognize our relationships as brothers and sisters. We don’t even act neighborly. For all our hyper-connectivity, the pope says, we are fragmented in ways that make it difficult to solve the problems that affect us all.

The pope knows that this darkness is passing and, as Christ’s representative, he is and must be a messenger of hope. Despite the bleakness around, God continues to sow the seeds of goodness. We only need to look at those who selflessly sacrificed their own health to serve others throughout the pandemic as signs of this goodness. We have ever greater opportunities for expanding spheres of relationships and to become “neighborly” in the way the foreign Samaritan did when he came across a stranger beaten up in the road and tended to his needs.

Advent and Christmas typically bring out our spirit of generosity. The pope tells us that when that generosity is truly exercised as charity, as love, we have what it takes to change the world for the better. Charity can allow good habits, like our end-of-the-year giving, to become moral values. When our generosity is mixed with a greater awareness of the great worth of each human being and when we turn that generosity towards the common good of all, we are helping to light the darkness. We are called to the higher virtue of solidarity, which the pope describes as more than sporadic generosity because it forms us into a community. Solidarity is born of conversion. If we take Jesus’ words and example to heart, we will make our hearts open to the whole world.

In Advent we listen to the prophets: those of old who prepared the way of the Lord, and those like Pope Francis who is striving to form us as the family God intends us to be. The prophet Isaiah dreamed of the day of the Lord, when natural enemies like lions and lambs could lie down together, and nations would use their resources to feed the world rather than fashion weapons. That dream becomes real when we take it seriously and walk in the light of the Lord.