Second Sunday of Christmas

Sunday 4 January 2015 

We can tell a lot from people’s faces and eyes, if they are blocked out or covered for legal reasons we really can’t get to identify them or recognise them we know if they are happy or sad, stressed, or tired. Equally we know if they are excited, happy or in love.

We know that what makes people seem to physically shine is their exposure to light – whether a foreign holiday in Lanzarote, or people I met recently home from Australia where it is over 40 degrees in Western Australia at this time of year. We know if they have got some sun through exposure – it shows on their face and their skin. After all they couldn’t have got it here!

But we also know if people are truly joyful people

I have encountered two saints in my life – Pope St John Paul II in Rome in 2002 and Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta on a visit to Blarney in the 1990s.

Both of them seemed to shine. Pope John Paul seemed to shimmer luminously – a fact that someone from Poland later confirmed to me when describing her meeting him.

Mother Teresa was being filmed in a documentary for the BBC in the 1970s in a home for the dying in Calcutta and the film crew pointed out to the presenter Malcolm Muggeridge that there was the room too dark to film in. he told them to keep filming and hope for the best. When the film was processed it was found that there was enough light after all and the interviewer concluded it could have come from only one source. This among other things led to his conversion to Catholicism.

Where did this light really come from? There is a law in science that all the earth’s energy can ultimately be traced back to the sun, and another law states that energy can neither be created or destroyed but changed from one form to another.

The source of all love must be Love itself – or God. Pope John Paul II and Mother Teresa had one thing in common - their closeness to Christ in the Tabernacle – in the Blessed Sacrament – Mother Teresa would spend five hours a day in prayer and Pope John Paul II would lock the doors of his chapel and spend hours prostrate before Jesus in the Tabernacle.

In the Bible in the Old Testament the name for a place to meet God was a tent or tabernacle – the first reading says: I ministered before him in the holy tabernacle.

 

St Paul in the New Testament sates that this is our calling: namely…

 

Before the world was made, [God] chose us, chose us in Christ,

to be holy and spotless, and to live through love in his presence

 

And St John tells us

 

All that came to be had life in him

and that life was the light of men,

a light that shines in the dark,

The Word was made flesh,

he lived among us.

John 1:1-18

 

As we begin 2015 I make a special appeal if you do already do so commit yourself as a new Year’s resolution to an hour of Eucharistic adoration per week 'in his presence, ministering in the tabernacle, before the Word made flesh. We need new adorers. Ask any adorer of the benefits of time in reflection, silence and love. It is a habit worth forming. If we can spend endless hours channel hopping in front of a TV can we not spare just one of our 168 hours in the week in the company of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament?

See the difference – see the joy and peace He brings, see the light that he gives,  the more we turn to the light, the more the shadows disappear.