[Salvation]

Friday, December 9

Friday of the Second Week of Advent

Faithful to a Fact

In today’s Gospel, Jesus says that only those who do not allow their prejudices to determine what is real can recognize him.

Saint Juan Diego was one of those. He did not expect nor understand what happened to him when he first saw Our Lady. He was faithful to the fact of her presence and obedient to her words. Today we live in a culture where truth has been reduced to a matter of interpretation and opinion, not of facts. No wonder Saint Juan Diego has become politically incorrect. I personally heard an important economist say that if Mexico wants to join the developed nations of the world, it had to get rid of its Catholic faith. This means, of course, to deny the veracity of the story of Our Lady of Guadalupe’s apparition to Saint Juan Diego. And yet, all those ideological efforts to separate the Mexican people from the Church crash against the fact of a piece of clothing belonging to this Mexican native, Juan Diego’s “tilma,” where the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe is miraculously engraved.

“Wisdom,” Jesus says in today’s Gospel, “is vindicated by her works.” The Christian faith is not based on an ideological agenda imposed by power. The Christian faith is based on a fact, the fact of the Incarnation. Christian life is a life of witnessing to this fact.

Reflection based on Matthew 11:16-19
Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete

Loving Father, empty me of every false idea and focus me on the fact of your Son made flesh.

[Salvation]

Saturday, December 10

Saturday of the Second Week of Advent

Closer Than We Thought

“I tell you that Elijah has already come, and they did not recognize him but did to him whatever they pleased.”

The Gospel tells us that the apostles understood the allusion to Elijah as metaphorical, referring to the greater prophet, John the Baptist, who by this time had been murdered by Herod. We know, however, that at other times in the Gospel they did not grasp what Jesus said to them. The apostles only came to a fuller comprehension of Jesus Christ as divine Messiah after his resurrection.

The stress of recognition in Jesus’ words is worth pondering. Advent offers us a grace to seek awareness of God at a deeper level of faith – not to remain at our current understanding of God’s relations with our soul. The presence of God is always much closer than we acknowledge, and it is often linked to divine request. Perhaps we do not recognize sufficiently these quiet requests from God for love and sacrifice.

John the Baptist is an excellent model to prompt recognition. His words, “he must increase, I must become less,” epitomize a soul giving itself completely to Jesus Christ. Our most important preparation in Advent can be to become humble, lowly, less; in doing so, our souls become docile, accessible to Jesus coming again to us in every opportunity we have to be generous in love.

Reflection based on Matthew 7:9a. 10-13
Father Donald Haggerty

Loving Father, help me to make a perfect gift of myself to you.