Early Christmas Gifts (My Theological Justification)

I grew up with a mom who loved giving Christmas gifts early…and I loved it! What child wouldn’t? One minute you are dreaming about playing Yars' Revenge on the Atari 2600, thinking it's still two weeks away; and the next thing you know it is in your hands! It was amazing. And I must confess that I often do the same with my own kids.

Oh, I can see a few of your heads nodding in disapproval. "It's ADVENT; Christmas doesn't begin until Mass on Christmas Eve!" That's the liturgical calendar, alright. But I think the early Christmas gift has a neat lesson to teach us, too.

Christmas is not only when we cast our glance backward in celebration of our Lord's first coming; it is also when look forward - to the day of His return. Many of us, at least unconsciously, feel that Day to be a long way off. (Two thousand years have already elapsed.) But the truth is that it could be just around the corner. We expect certain prophetic events first, but the exact day and moment of Jesus' return are going to come as a shock. It's not on a calendar; we can't watch the seconds counting down in Times Square. One second we will be slugging through difficulties, and the next we will be staring into the eyes of the One we've longed for our entire lives!


That's what the early Christmas gift reminds us of. A child is going along, trudging through the loooong weeks before Christmas Vacation, when BAM! Christmas suddenly breaks out!

The Lord might come for you or me at any second. None of us knows when our lives will end. The post I am writing may never be finished. Or perhaps I will be worrying about the big meeting coming up at work when...Christmas suddenly breaks out! That is quite a thought.

Hard to Imagine the Afterlife?

With my last post being on Hell and mortal sin, I felt the need to revisit a post about Heaven:
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 "Hard to Imagine the Afterlife?"
I know. St. Paul had the same problem though, “no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived, what God has prepared for those who love Him” (1 Corinthians 2:10). Right now our knowledge of God is conceptual, we use analogies from this created world to speak of the Totally Other: “now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face…[we] shall understand fully, even as we have been fully understood” (1 Cor. 13:12). Don’t take this “darkness of faith” too hard though –we’ve all been through it before; and it turned out great.

None of us remember our first 40-or-so weeks, but they were lived in complete darkness. Our entire world was that wet, increasingly-cramped space inside our mom's womb. And we couldn’t even begin to imagine that there was this entire world, entire planet, awaiting us outside. We lived beneath our mother’s heart, exposed to its constant rhythm, and yet we had never seen her face! We had grown to recognize her voice, but we hadn’t developed to the point of understanding any of her words. And birth – talk about TRAUMA! All of that amniotic fluid we’ve been swimming in, gone in an instant; our heads compacted and squeezed through the birth canal; the light; the cold; that humiliating slap on the butt! But we finally entered the real world, finally got that chance to see mom face-to-face, to eat through our mouths instead of our belly buttons, and a million other experiences that we’re impossible to conceive of from the darkness of the womb.

Turns out that was just the warm-up; we’re still in utero, and the REAL world awaiting us "outside" remains inconceivable. We’re going to get the chance to enter it though; and just like before, we don’t have a clue when. This time around though, we get to participate in our own growth process. Each "yes" to God allows our spiritual "organs" to develop a bit more. If we haven't come to full term when the moment of birth arrives though, God has a top-notch NICU experience planned for us (the Church calls it purgatory; 1 Cor.3:10-15). Listen to the Apostle John:

"Beloved we are God's children now; it does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when [Jesus] appears we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is. And everyone who thus hopes in Him purifies himself as He is pure." (1 John 3:1-3) 
The Prayer of St. Francis is right on the money, "It is in dying that we are born to eternal life."

Jesus' Missing 18 Years - Part II

In yesterday's post I tackled the broad outline of how Jesus spent the 18 years not narrated in the gospels.  Today I wanted to share a few specifics regarding that period - ways Jesus' life intersects with ours:

• I realize that some reading this have lost parents.  Jesus knows that pain;  He lost Joseph.  The gospel shows the deep pain Jesus experienced at the death of His friend Lazarus (Jn.11:33-38); it had to be excruciating at the loss of Joseph, the man He called "abba." It would have been Jesus' duty to wash and prepare his body for burial.  I cannot imagine how difficult that had to be.

• In a culture where women could not work outside of the home, it would have fallen to Jesus to provide for His Mother. He knew what it was to work and be depended upon to make a living,

• The work Jesus did was manual. It took time and sweat, and if His customers didn’t like it, He didn’t get paid. 

•  Jesus shared in the same good, healthy human desires we all do. He cherished His friends. Like all of us He also needed time to be alone, to turn to His Father in prayer, and “recharge His batteries.”    

• Jesus was a young man; he was able to look at a young woman and appreciate her beauty (both inner and outer).  There shouldn’t be anything shocking about that. Jesus was a man, and God created men with an appreciation for women. Because we live in a fallen world though, we are use to seeing this God-given orientation tainted by lust. When Jesus looked at a woman there was nothing self-seeking in His gaze; He saw her for the priceless, beautiful work of God she was.  Jesus redeemed our vision of the opposite sex!  

• When all of His friends started courting and getting married, Jesus didn’t.  He probably knew what it was to feel like a “third wheel” at times. 

• Jesus, God the Son, knew what it was to be a “nobody” – to live over 90% of His life in a small town, work hard to put food on the table, and appear to have absolutely no effect on the world going on around Him.  (Not that He actually was a nobody though - and neither are you!)
  

I love thinking about the ways Jesus has shared our experiences.  I have often thought that the reason we have been told so little about His growing up and home life, is so that we an empty mental canvas upon which we can imagine Him doing all the things familiar to us.

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More on Jesus' Baptism

I've written before about Jesus' death being foreshadowed in His baptism, but it wasn't until praying the Rosary a few nights ago that I also saw His resurrection there. The death is in the going down into the water, but the resurrection in the coming up into the presence of the Spirit and the voice of the Father. St. Paul even did the leg work for us, linking the resurrection to the Spirit and God [the Father's] declaration. Paul wrote that Jesus was "designated Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead" (Romans 1:4). I can't believe how dense I am not to have recognized this before, especially when I've taught on the symbolism of death and resurrection in regards to our baptisms!

We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life (Romans 6:4).

A Slap in the Face!

What else can you call it? He left without a word. Personally, I think it's pretty freakin' cool.

Those were my thoughts while praying the Rosary and meditating on Jesus' resurrection. I wanted to picture Him strolling through the door of the tomb victorious, but that isn't what the Gospels give us. No, the women were there to anoint His Body, the angel rolled away the stone...and nothing. It's like Death and the Grave weren't worthy enough foes to waste a second of His time gloating. Jesus was just gone - going about business (actually pronounced BID-nis) .

I remember listening to a sermon when I was a teenager. Our parish priest had visited the Holy Sepulcher years before, the church built over the site of Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection. He had gone expecting to "find the Lord" there, only to be bitterly disappointed. He bent down to gaze into the tomb...but felt nothing. And then the truth hit him - that tomb is the one place you won't find Him!

Note: No person was actually slapped in the writing of this blog, it was simply the goofiest pic I could find.

The Tenacious D

No, not the homies pictured at right. I'm talking about Death, the ultimate tenacious "D." You see, I realize that I'm a bit strange because I don't experience much sadness when someone passes. Yes, I KNOW - I sound horrible, even to myself. I do experience very strong emotions...but rarely in response to death. I was reflecting upon my strangeness over the weekend, and came up with the following explanation, a mini-essay if you will:

"My grieving usually involves, not death, but the tough things that precede death - pain and struggle with illness, catastrophes of life, relationship difficulties, living with the consequences of poor choices, people's struggles with addictions, etc. Someone's death, their absence from my daily life, doesn't affect me in the same way. And I guess that is for a number of reasons:

"I usually still speak to these people (although no, I don't hear them answering back!) I ask them to pray for me, and I pray for them - that their experience of purgatory is brief, or not necessary at all. I realize that, in God, they can understand my love for them and the motivations for my actions (good and bad) much better than I can myself. If there was anything I didn't feel able to say to them in life, for whatever reason, those restrictions aren't there anymore. They're free of the pains and struggles I mentioned in the paragraph above. There is also the recognition that, for all of the theological study I've done, these people have leaped beyond me in the twinkling of an eye. I also hope to be able to spend a literal eternity with them. I guess for all of these reasons, death doesn't sadden me all that much. If I feared that a person I loved was totally resisting God's attempts to work in his/her life though, then that passing would make me sad; there is something far worse than earthly death out there.

"My discomfort with my own death centers around the unknown: will there be a great deal of pain beforehand? When my time comes, will I be living as God's child; or will I have chosen something incompatible with Him? (I'm very aware of my ability to sin, how feeble I really am when it comes to virtue; so I have to stay on my guard.)"

Note: This is my second post with a photo of Jack Black. Forget my views on death; what does that say about me?