News - December 2020 RSS Feed

One option for this Sunday’s second reading is the passage from Colossians 3: 12-21. In these days of pandemic, financial challenges, and entrenched views about any number of matters, let us reflect on the words of this passage. Nothing will change who we are to God; we are God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved. Let us choose to reflect on this reality on a continual and on-going basis. In pondering who we are to and for God, let us pray as well that we will allow ourselves and encourage one another to be compassionate, kind, humble, gentle and patient. Let us choose to let “the peace of Christ control (y)our hearts, the peace into which (you) we were also called in one body.

We know that we are nearing the time when night is the longest it can be. We also know that there is no such thing as darkness; there is only an absence of light. Like John the Baptist, as our Gospel makes clear, we are to testify to the light that is Jesus. Given that we believe that the being of Jesus is wholly integrated in our earthly bodies, our privilege is to allow that light to shine as brightly as we can stand it. During this time of the year, we use a proliferation of lights as a way of being renewed. We pray that we will be a source of warmth and comfort for one another just as the glow of the lights are for each of us. Just as John the Baptist fully embraced his mission of testifying to the light, we give our testimony as we allow our bodies to radiate that light with our warm smiles and composure, our greeting one another as sisters and brothers of Jesus, and treating each other with the respect we pay to the sacred Presence of Jesus dwelling within us.