Our Journey to Christmas with Pope Francis Rev. Nick Donnelly
Dedicated to my much loved Aunty Pat, who has inspired and encouraged me in my discipleship of our Lord
All booklets are published thanks to the generous support of the members of the Catholic Truth Society
CATHOLIC TRUTH SOCIETY publishers to the holy see
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Contents First Week of Advent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Second Week of Advent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 Third Week of Advent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 Fourth Week of Advent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 Christmas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
All rights reserved. First published 2016 by The Incorporated Catholic Truth Society, 40-46 Harleyford Road London SE11 5AY Tel: 020 7640 0042 Fax: 020 7640 0046. © 2016 The Incorporated Catholic Truth Society. ISBN 978 1 78469 138 7
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First Week of Advent Advent is a journey to meet God Prayers for the First Week of Advent Grant your faithful, we pray, almighty God, the resolve to run forth to meet your Christ with righteous deeds at his coming Collect for the First Sunday of Advent May these mysteries, O Lord, in which we have participated, profit us, we pray, for even now, as we walk amid passing things you teach us by them to love the things of heaven and hold fast to what endures. Prayer after Communion for the First Week of Advent Intention for the First Week of Advent During the First Week of Advent, Pope Francis invites us to set out with him on the journey to meet God. The Holy Father wants each one of us to “resolve to run to meet your Christ” and be awake to the truth that we “walk amid passing things” towards the “things of heaven” that endure.
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Our journey to meet God Pope Francis sees Advent and Christmas as a journey, in fact as two journeys: our journey towards God and God’s journey towards us. The Holy Father wants us to understand the nature of our journey towards Christmas so we don’t get sidetracked or lost on the way. He also wants to help us cultivate the right dispositions necessary to undertake this Advent journey. If we follow his advice in our day-today lives during this season, we will place ourselves in the right place for God to meet us in his journey from heaven to earth. This is how Pope Francis puts it: The season of Advent is a time when the Church and the People of God journey anew toward Christmas; we journey to an encounter with the Lord. Christmas is not merely a commemoration in time nor simply a memory of something beautiful. Christmas is something more. We travel down this path to meet the Lord. During the season of Advent, then, we journey to meet him, to encounter him with our hearts and our lives, to meet him, the living One, as he is; to meet him in faith.1 We so often hear the Christian life described as a “journey” that it has become a commonplace expression that we pass over with the casual assumption that we know what is meant by the metaphor. However, during this season of Advent and Christmas, Pope Francis wants each one of us fully to know and live this wonderful, miraculous journey we call the Christian life.
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Journeys to meet God Journeys to meet God are a fundamental experience and reality of the Bible - Abraham’s journey to the Promised Land where he met the Lord in the firebrand of the Covenant; Moses and the Hebrew tribes journey from slavery to Mount Sinai where they met the Lord, YHWH, in the cloud of glory; Elijah’s journey to Mount Horeb where he met the Lord in the sound of silence after the storm. These Old Testament journeys to meet God culminate in, and are transcended by, Our Lady’s and St Joseph’s journey to Bethlehem, and the journeys of the poor shepherds and the Wise Kings in homage of God become man. Here the mystery of God coming to his people is revealed in the littleness of the baby Jesus. All these journeys attain their fulfilment and completion in the ultimate journey of man’s encounter with God. This is Our Lord’s journey from Galilee to Jerusalem where the mystery of God is fully revealed in the vulnerability of Christ – true God, true man – hanging on the Cross of Golgotha. Here all journeys cease; God and man are reconciled. This is the journey we are now caught up in the Church’s journey towards that consummation of this reconciliation when the heavenly Jerusalem descends to earth, and the Bridegroom comes to welcome his Bride to the Wedding Feast of the Lamb at the end of time.
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Pope Francis’s guide to the journey In light of this, it is understandable why the image and language of “journey” is one of Pope Francis’s favourite ways of describing the Christian life. In his first homily as pontiff, the very first image he used was that of a journey: Journeying. “O house of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the Lord” (Is 2:5). This is the first thing that God said to Abraham: walk in my presence and live blamelessly. Journeying: our life is a journey, and when we stop moving, things go wrong. Always journeying, in the presence of the Lord, in the light of the Lord, seeking to live with the blamelessness that God asked of Abraham in his promise.2 Pope Francis has provided us with a map of the journey, pointing out that its essential direction is both outward and inward: out towards others and in towards our heart where God awaits us. “This dual journey is the double path that Jesus wants from his disciples.” The outward journey Jesus wants from us is to go out in service of others, through corporal and spiritual acts of mercy. Jesus sends us out “to proclaim the gospel, to go out to bring salvation, the gospel of salvation” and to “serve others”. Going out to others in service is so essential to the Christian life that if we don’t do this we can’t call ourselves Christian:
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If a disciple does not walk in order to serve, his walking is of no use. If his life is not for service, his life is of no use, as a Christian. [One can become boastful and say], “Yes, I am a Christian; I am at peace, I confess, I go to Mass, I follow the commandments.” But where is the service to Jesus in the sick, in the imprisoned, in the hungry, in the naked? This is precisely what Jesus told us we must do because he is there…service to Christ in others.3 The inner journey, according to Pope Francis, is just as important to the Christian life as the outward journey because without it the gospel that we take “to others will be weak, watered down - a gospel with no strength”: But there is another path of the disciple of Jesus: the inner journey, of the disciple who seeks the Lord every day, through prayer, in meditation.4 Choosing to make the journey Undertaking this journey doesn’t happen automatically just because we call ourselves Christians. It requires our decision and commitment, not only to set out on the journey, but also to persevere and stay the course, cooperating with the grace and providence of God. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church expresses it: Angels and men, as intelligent and free creatures, have to journey toward their ultimate destinies by their free choice and preferential love. They can therefore go astray. Indeed, they have sinned. (CCC 311).
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Pope Francis, as an experienced guide to the spiritual life, cautions us about the missteps and pitfalls that face us on our journey. He advises us to orientate ourselves correctly on the journey with this passage from the Gospel of John: “And after I have gone and prepared you a place, I shall return to take you with me; so that where I am you may be too. You know the way to the place where I am going.” Thomas said to him, “Lord, we do not know where you are going, so how can we know the way?” Jesus said, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one can come to the Father, except through me.” (Jn 14: 3-6). The fundamental truth that Pope Francis wants us to draw from Our Lord describing himself as “the Way” is to realise that to be a genuine Christian we must be constantly moving forward on the Way of Christ, “with Baptism we begin to walk, and walk and walk”. By this the Holy Father is referring to our vocation to holiness, which is to become more and more like Our Lord. As the Second Vatican Council puts it, we “must follow in his footsteps and conform [our]selves to his image seeking the will of the Father in all things.” (Lumen Gentium, 40).
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Walk in love, as Christ loved us In Catholic spiritual life, this following ever closer in Our Lord’s footsteps into holiness is called the imitatio Christi, the imitation of Christ. The apostles describe the whole Christian life as an ever closer imitation of Christ: This, in fact, is what you were called to do, because Christ suffered for you and left an example for you to follow the way he took. (1 P 2:21) Try, then, to imitate God, as children of his that he loves, and follow Christ by loving as he loved you, giving himself up in our place as a fragrant offering and a sacrifice to God. (Ep 5:1). Thomas à Kempis’s devotional book, The Imitation of Christ, used to be, after the Bible, the most widely read book of Christianity, but the phrase “imitation of Christ” has become less popular in our time. This might be due to the association of the word “imitation” with forgery and fakes. This is unfortunate because truly living in imitation of Christ means leaving behind the fakery and falseness of sin for the authentic holiness of Christ. A true understanding of the imitatio Christi will help us, through deepening our knowledge of Christ and by co-operating with his grace, to become more and more like him in our attitudes and behaviour. By so doing, we will live our lives
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out of the truth that Our Lord is the Way, the Truth and the Life. As Thomas à Kempis put it: Follow Me. I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Without the Way, there is no going. Without the Truth, there is no knowing. Without the Life, there is no living. I am the Way which you must follow, the Truth which you must believe, the Life for which you must hope. I am the inviolable Way, the infallible Truth, the unending Life. I am the Way that is straight, the supreme Truth, the Life that is true, the blessed, the uncreated Life. If you abide in My Way you shall know the Truth, and the Truth shall make you free, and you shall attain life everlasting. (The Imitation of Christ, chapter 56). Again and again Pope Francis encourages us to imitate Jesus, to love like Jesus, to serve others like Jesus, to be merciful and forgiving like Jesus. When we put the needs of others before our own needs we truly imitate Our Lord, who “came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” (Mt 20:28): Serving and giving oneself for others may make one seem like a loser in the eyes of the world, but in reality that person is imitating Christ’s love and service, which conquered death and gave life to the world.5
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The four ways we can get lost Pope Francis identifies four ways in which we can get ourselves lost by failing to follow Jesus as the Way, the Truth and the Life: Spiritual mummies. These are Christians who stop growing in their spiritual lives, who are lukewarm disciples, “neither cold nor hot”. (Rv 3:15) They follow the external observances of being Christian, going to Mass, praying devotions, contributing to the needs of the Church, but their hearts remain hard and unmerciful towards others: A Christian who doesn’t walk, who doesn’t make his way, is an “unChristian” Christian, so to speak: he is a somewhat pagan Christian, standing there, standing still, immobile, he does not go forward in Christian life. He does not bring the Beatitudes to fruition in his life. He does not do works of mercy. He stands still. Pardon the word, but it is as if he were a “mummy”, there, a “spiritual mummy”. Indeed, there are Christians who are “spiritual mummies”, standing still, they don’t do anything bad, but they don’t do anything good. However, this way of being does not bear fruit: they are not fruitful Christians because they do not walk.6
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Stubbornly lost. Every Christian loses his way on the journey. We all fall into sin and lose track of the right way to go. But there are those Christians who stay lost because, even though they realise they’ve taken the wrong path, they refuse to admit their sin, and thereby fail to hear Our Lord calling them back onto the right path: There are some who walk and go astray as we too, often go astray. It is the Lord himself who comes and helps us. It is not a tragedy to go astray. In fact, the tragedy is being stubborn and saying: “this is the way”, and not letting the Lord’s voice tell us, “This is not the way, turn around and go the right way”. It is important to go back to the right path when we realise our errors, the mistakes we make and not to be stubborn and always go astray, because this distances us from Jesus, because he is the Way.7 The traditional word for admitting that we’re lost and turning round to follow the Lord’s voice is “conversion”. We know our journey is going in the right direction when we accept that it consists of a series of conversions as we grow in knowledge of our own sinfulness and our need for Our Lord’s help. The stubborn reject the need for conversion.
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Misguided wanderers. This type of Christian is forever restless, always seeking something novel, such as new way of praying or a different parish or a new theology that breaks with the “old” doctrines of the Church or even a new religion that mixes together various elements from different world religions: There are others who walk but don’t know where they are going: they are misguided in Christian life, wanderers. Their life amounts to roaming, here and there, thus losing the beauty of drawing near to Jesus in life. In short, they lose their way because they roam and so often this roaming, this misguided wandering, leads them to a life with no way out: too much wandering transforms life into a labyrinth and then they don’t know how to get out. Thus, in the end, they have missed Jesus’s call, they have no compass to find the way out and they wander, they roam, they search. Mesmerised to a standstill. This type of Christian gets fixated on one aspect of Christian life to the exclusion of all else, such as a way of celebrating Mass or an issue of social justice or a place of pilgrimage or a particular parish. Such aspects of Christian life may be good in themselves, but they become harmful when they become the sole focus because they make a person feel peaceful and secure in a restless, insecure world. There is always the danger of
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any created thing becoming an idol that stops us truly following in the footsteps of Our Lord: There are others on the journey who are seduced by beauty, by something, and they stop midway, mesmerised by what they see, by that idea, by that proposal, by that landscape, and they stop. But Christian life is not charm, it is truth. It is Jesus Christ. And St Teresa of Avila said, speaking about this journey: “We are walking in order to arrive at the encounter with Jesus”…Indeed, Christian life must continue. It is important to ensure that something beautiful, something peaceful, a peaceful life does not mesmerise me so as to stop me.8 Pope Francis’s examination of conscience for the journey Pope Francis recommends that we frequently undertake an examination of conscience in order to check if we’re following the Way of Jesus or have gone astray. The Holy Father insists that we often take “five short minutes” to take our bearings on the journey. He recommends the following questions: •
How is my Christian journey, which I began in Baptism?
•
Am I standing still? Have I gone astray? Am I constantly wandering, not knowing where to go spiritually?
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•
Do I stop at things that I like: worldliness, vanity - so many things?
•
Do I always go forward, making the Beatitudes and the works of mercy tangible?
•
How am I walking? Am I following Jesus? Is he the Way I am following?
•
“Let us ask the Holy Spirit to teach us to walk correctly, always, and when we get tired, let us take a short rest and go on. Let us ask the Lord for this grace.”9 Journey to the Mountain of the Lord
At the beginning of Advent, Pope Francis wants us to set out on our journey towards Christmas with deeper awareness of the nature of the Christian life as a journey. He also wants us to take our bearings to make sure we’re going in the right direction, and that we have the right attitudes to see us through to our final destination - the adoration of the baby of Bethlehem and the adoration of the Lamb in Heaven. The sacred Scriptures of Advent are essential “way posts” that point us on the right direction to take during the four weeks. Pope Francis’s first Advent homily as pope was on the Book of the Prophet Isaiah: It shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the house of the Lord shall be established as the highest of the mountains,
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and shall be raised above the hills; and all the nations shall flow to it, and many peoples shall come, and say: “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.” (Is 2:1-3) The Holy Father wants us to learn two essential truths from Isaiah’s image of journeying to the mountain of the Lord: always remember that your life is a journey with a purpose, and make the goal of your life meeting Jesus. Always remember that your life is a journey with a purpose In the First Reading we heard the Prophet Isaiah speak to us about a journey, and he says that in the latter days, at the end of the journey, the mountain of the Lord’s Temple shall be established as the highest mountain. He says this to tell us that our life is a journey: we must go on this journey to arrive at the mountain of the Lord, to encounter Jesus.10 All around us we see people who have lost their way because they have forgotten, or rejected, the truth that our lives are a journey towards the mountain of the Lord. Our culture is sinking in world-weary cynicism, hopelessness
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and violence because people are not journeying towards God. The image of the “mountain of the Lord� means that we journey in the expectation of finding God in this world, not only in heaven. A mountain is the biggest, the most solid, object on the planet. It indicates that the destination of our journey is not some dreamlike, far off utopia, it is an encounter with God that will be unmistakable and very real. Make the goal of your life meeting Jesus We must go on this journey to arrive at the mountain of the Lord, to encounter Jesus. The most important thing that can happen to a person is to meet Jesus: this encounter with Jesus who loves us, who has saved us, who has given his life for us. Encounter Jesus. And we are journeying in order to meet Jesus.11 One of the wonderful things about Advent is that it recapitulates the purpose of our lives: a journey to meet the Lord. The expectation and preparation we experience in the four weeks leading up to Christmas enable us to get back in touch with the expectation and preparation that are the hallmarks of a Christian life orientated towards its true purpose - to meet God.
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A Prayer for the First Week of Advent Lord, we ask for the grace to make this journey with several dispositions that will aid us. Perseverance in prayer: to pray more. Diligence in fraternal charity: to draw closer to those in need. And joy in praising you, Lord. May we begin this journey in prayer, charity and praise, so that you, Lord, might come to meet us. May we allow you to meet us with our defences down, in openness. Amen.12 Reflections: My journey to meet God Do I see my life as a journey? Am I journeying • Inwards towards God, and, •
Outwards towards others in love?
Do I journey in, and because of, the grace of faith, cherishing this gift? Look again at Pope Francis’s examination of conscience: •
How is my Christian journey, which I began in Baptism?
•
Am I standing still? Have I gone astray? Am I constantly wandering, not knowing where to go spiritually?
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•
Do I stop at things that I like: worldliness, vanity so many things?
•
Do I always go forward, making the Beatitudes and the works of mercy tangible?
•
How am I walking? Am I following Jesus? Is he the Way I am following?
Ask the Holy Spirit for grace to walk correctly in prayer, charity and praise, imitating Our Lord.
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