In This Christmas Season…

Author and Priest, Ronald Rolheiser tells about attending a seminar on prayer. The woman leading the seminar was an expert in meditation, and at one point she shared with the group that her own prayer life involved sitting in silence for two hours each day. During this time, she would often have some pretty moving experiences of God. 

During their discussion time, Ronald asked how her experiences of God in prayer compared to her everyday experiences of God in her day-to-day life. She said, “No comparison. Being with and eating with my family is a good human experience, but it is not religious. It’s just human. In meditation, I have a true religious experience.”  

As awesome as meditation is, and I personally have benefited from it greatly, God is at work far beyond our meditation cushions and even beyond our deepest moments of prayer. The God who has become incarnate in human flesh is found not only in meditation and monasteries but also in our homes. 

Rolheiser goes on to ask: “Why do we go on pilgrimages to holy places and not instead sit barefoot and feel the holiness of the soil of the earth? Why do we go to places like Lourdes and Fatima, to see where the Blessed Virgin might have cried, and not notice the tears in the eyes of the person sitting across the family table from ourselves? Why are we all enthralled by a person like Padre Pio, who carried the wounds of Jesus in his hands and feet, and blind to the wounds of Christ in the face of the emotionally needy person we so much try to avoid? There is nothing wrong with pilgrimages… shrines, and Padre Pio, but it is not in and through them that God says the most important things to us.”

The God who is love, who was born in a stable, who stepped into this world in the person of Jesus, is a God who is found, first of all, in our homes, in our families, at our tables, in our joys, and in our suffering. And in our own love shared.

In this Christmas season and in the year ahead, I continue to pray that God would give you eyes to see Christ in the world and the people around you. May you experience his deep, healing love for you. And may you share that love with a world desperately in need. 

Let us pray:  We praise you, Holy God, for the gift of Jesus, for his unconditional love, mercy, and grace. We thank you for stepping into this world, and into our lives. Empower us to be bearers of his light – not just today, but throughout the year. It is in his powerful name we pray. Amen.