Bulletin of the Catholic Community at The Family Foundation School
Pauca Verba (a few words)
Number 8 – January 17, 2010
With the feasts of Epiphany and The Lord’s Baptism – the Christmas time has closed. It is a time for gratitude. How God has blessed us! And with that, we return to what is called the Ordinary Time – for a few weeks until Lent which begins – Ash Wednesday, February 17.
But believing in the Incarnation (God become one of us in Jesus Christ), there is really no such thing as ordinary time, is there? All of time is extraordinary time. Each day is an extraordinary gift of God. And if indeed, in Jesus Christ, God has stepped down into our miry world, this valley of tears, then even the down-side of our lives is an extraordinary opportunity to discover God’s presence and love. Let’s be on the lookout – like the people who lookout from watchtowers and lighthouses!
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Here is a little drawing from the December 2009 issue of The Catholic Worker. Look carefully! Can you make out the scene? It is a contemporary Christmas scene – a manger borrowed from a 2010 lived reality. It is the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph – but this Holy Family is living in a city dumpster. Instead of choirs of angels and a traveling star, a streetlight illumines the scene. There’s paper and garbage instead of sweet straw. What about this? God loving and holding dearly a world such as this! And what do I know about poverty in my own country and in faraway places?
In the article which accompanied the drawing, author Colin Miller, tells of the homeless men who live on the property of the local city-parish. Getting to know these men, Colin and his wife invited one of them, Crete, to live with them in their apartment which had an extra room. Eventually they started renting a larger house so that other men could live with them as well. Some people who were resentful of this said, “We can’t have a shelter in our neighborhood” to which Colin said, “We don’t believe that interacting with the poor should be done primarily through institutions – that people should give money to the shelters instead of inviting people in for meals and a bed. We don’t call this a shelter; we call it being Church – people trying to bear witness to Christ in the gifts we’ve received.” By gifts received he meant the poor who were presented to him to care for. It’s not unlike Maggie Doyne going on a rich-girl’s back packing trip through Asia and landing in Nepal where she bought an acre of land and set up an orphanage for discarded children. Some people live the gospel this basically.
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While visiting the gift shop of the Benedictine monks at Mount Saviour this past week I found a new CD called, “Music From the Vatican – ALMA MATER.” It features the voice of Pope Benedict XVI speaking to people about The Blessed Virgin Mary at Marian shrines around the world. Listen to what he said about faith and music in May of 2008.
“Faith is love and therefore it creates poetry and music. Faith is joy, and therefore it creates beauty. Cathedrals are not medieval monuments but living buildings where we feel at home: we find God and each other. Neither is great music – Gregorian chant, or Bach, or Mozart – a thing of the past, for it lives in the vitality of the liturgy and our faith. If faith is alive, Christian culture does not become “past” but remains living and present. And if faith is alive, today too we can answer the enduring imperative of the psalms: “Sing to Him a new song.”
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Reflecting on Our Lady’s lovely title – Auxilium Christianorum – Help of Christians, Cardinal Angelo Comastri has said: “But the path sometimes leads uphill, the road of life is often strewn with pits and snares: we might fall, we might lose our way, we might lose hope. We call upon our Mother and immediately we feel a consoling caress, a kiss that fills us with strength and confidence.”
