By Rev. Joe McCloskey, SJ
Listen, O house of David! Is it not enough for you to weary people, must
you also weary my God? Therefore the
Lord himself will give you this sign: the virgin shall conceive, and bear
a son, and shall name him Emmanuel. Isaiah 7:13-14
Through him we have received the grace of apostleship, to
bring about the obedience of faith, for the sake of his name, among all the
Gentiles, among whom are you also, who are called to belong to Jesus Christ; to
all the beloved of God in Rome, called to be holy. Romans 1:5-7A
When Joseph awoke, he did as the angel of the Lord had
commanded him and took his wife into his home. Matthew 1:24
Piety
Advent is built around the
coming of Jesus as our Savior. He comes
that we may have life and have it more abundantly. We are created to the image and likeness of
God. Our piety reveals the likeness. We have in the celebration of the birth of
Christ that is soon to be upon us the statement that our humanness has a God
dimension. It is not that we have to see
beyond the sign. The sign that the baby
of Nazareth is gives us our humanness as a sign of the presence of God in us. How we put Christ into our lives by our
prayer and good works that have their beginnings in the inspirations of God is
what our piety is all about. The force
of God’s love that is in the interior of our lives flows to the exterior by our
prayer and good works. The truth of our
piety is in the interior but the reality of our piety is seen in the sign that
our good actions are. The externals of
piety are the signs that God is with us.
The truth of piety is in the relation of the externals of our piety to
the truth of our loving God.
Study
We study how to keep our hands sinless and our
hearts clean. Paul calls himself the
slave of Christ. Our study of Christ allows us to put on his
mind and his heart. The exchange of
hearts is the richness of our growing up into Christ. We
are so much more than slaves of Christ. Our
study not only allows us to welcome Christ into our lives but it also makes it
possible to live an even greater presence of Christ in our lives. We go back to our beginnings so that we may
enthrone Christ in our hearts by dedicating all that we are and all that we
have done to his name. We study the
Morning Offering and our personal prayers of turning over our lives over to
Christ so that we can mean our prayers at a deeper level in our hearts as we
grow more and more into Christ.
Action
We work at giving God carte blanche in our lives. We invite God to initiate every action of our
lives and we ask God to carry them out with his gracious assistance. Thus every action of our lives can begin
through him and be carried out through him.
We open wide the doors of our hearts that the Christ who made us temples
of the Holy Spirit will no longer be a prisoner of our hearts. We work at making Christ the center of our
lives and hope to arrive at that day when Christ will truly be our all. Even as Emmanuel means God is with us we take
on the name of Christian so that we might be not just like Christ but real “Christs”
to each other.
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