Good morning, Brothers. And Happy 3rd Sunday of Advent—Gaudete Sunday/ Sunday of JOY!
Just as Jesus gave us the sacrament of HOPE—the Eucharist—when it all seemed HOPELESS(Judas betrays him, He’s facing death),
So, today we celebrate Gaudete Sunday—a foretaste of the full Christmas JOY —in the middle of a broken world, by centering on Christ.
In earlier Church history, it was celebrated as a badly needed break in a penitential Advent that lasted 40 days, just like Lent, complete with fasting and somber purple. For the celebration, the purple was put away, in favor of ROSE as the day’s liturgical color, to signal JOY and HOPE.
About Advent as part of the Ongoing Incarnation, we can say,
First: The JOY of Gaudete Sunday is not just our JOY:
As we turn to Jesus in expectation, it’s HIS turn to do as his Cousin John did at the Visitation: He jumps for JOY… at us! (He’s dying to meet us).
Second: At this late stage in the Incarnation, Jesus is immersed in his Pre-Hidden Life, if you will: He’s in his element—at once in his Human, Marian Temple and full of DivineGrace.
“The Word became flesh and pitched his TENT among us!”— as John’s Prologue puts it in Greek, to say Jesus enters fully into our lives and lives as one of us. This was the original reading for the liturgy celebrating the Holy Birth, before Luke’s Nativity story eclipsed it. (Cute won out.)
Advent transforms Expectancy into Birth—which happens in the womb, in the heart, in the world, and in the Order.
Our role is active and passive: We let it challenge us and cheer us; we let it interrupt our lives, even hurt us, because love hurts, and we learn to rest into our restlessness—by resting in God, who gives us Sabbath rest.
How can we experience the true JOY of Christ’s coming in a time of CRISIS—be it a crisis of belonging, so common today, or a crisis in the Order, as Dom Bernardus sees it?x
As we heard House Reports full of HOPE and struggle, we came upon an Abbey like MOKOTO in the Congo, where—out of real-world necessity—the inward-looking Church that many in the new generation are turning away from, experienced an unprecedented balancing act:
For a time, during a war emergency, they held in tension their Contemplative life, alongside the outward-looking field-hospitality toward a beleaguered population that came right next to them by the thousands—interrupting but not destroying their life.
We might ask how we would preserve JOY in such a state. Are we resilient and grounded enough in Christ?
And in our own neck of the woods
torn by the Western crises of meaning and cultural implosion driving record numbers of youth to wasted lives with no direction, to drugs and suicide —
How can an example like Mokoto’s give HOPE to others—both to refugees under fire, and to all of us?
How can we offer our life as field hospital for our lost generations? How exactly do we give the widow’s mite out of our poverty and fragility?
Would we claim that it’s not our call?
How do we discern exceptions?
Mokoto had to house the many who came to them in makeshift TENTS—as we did when we had to help our own youth shaken by wars and spiritual crises who came to us for salvation in a previous generation, and couldn’t fit them in our house, so we started making foundations.
Joy happens as a result of relieving suffering—not just our own but others’.
JOY can also be an act of resistance against despair—and against despair’s attempt to see death as the end of life, as the ‘stranglement’ of life.”
Saint Paul commands the Thessalonians to love more—and to REJOICE always.
It’s not about forcing themselves, but about seeing the world differently.
Paul never writes more about JOY than he does in the letter to the Philippians—known as “The Letter of JOY” and “the Epistle of JOY.”
BUT he was writing from prison! So, the JOY he’s talking about does not depend on our circumstances but on our relationship with Jesus Christ, who gives us HOPE and resilience.
A serious lack of JOY in today’s world sends us for a loop because we know we are made for JOY..