Sister Josephine Carney Funeral: Memories Are Seeds of Hope

Memories Are Seeds of Hope 

Homily Preached at the Funeral Mass for Sister Josephine Carney, SSA

Before I begin, I just have two personal things to say.  The first is that I come from a family that cries when they sing “O Canada” at hockey games.  My father ignored this fact when he asked me to preach at his funeral, and my dear friend Sister Josephine did the same.  If I run into trouble fulfilling her commission it is important you know that it’s not grief, but gratitude, that makes this hard. 

The second thing is a word to the Sisters of Saint Ann.  It’s not my place to thank them for the love and care they showed one of their own in the years of her physical decline, and especially at the end of her life.  But I’m at least entitled to thank them—and especially Sister Mary Ellen King—for the love and care they showed for me during these past weeks.  Despite her long years, Sister Jo’s death is a great loss to me, and sharing time at her bedside with Sister Mary Ellen and other Sisters lightened the sorrow considerably.

***

Memories are seeds of hope.

Like the aging Apostle John, Sister Josephine repeated a single message in the latter years of her life.  It was a less obvious message than Saint John’s refrain “God is love,” but her conviction that “memories are seeds of hope, producing ever-deeper roots of faith and love,” was the fruit of personal experience and prayer.

Her memories are now our memories—a legacy to her religious community, her family, her friends, her students, and indeed to the Church.

Sister Josephine herself chose our second reading, Saint Paul’s fervent prayer of blessing and thanksgiving. It is one single sentence in Greek—the longest in the New Testament. If Saint Paul wrote a sentence like that in Sister Josephine’s English Lit class he would have got very poor marks indeed.

But we can excuse the Apostle for his run-on sentence because within these eleven verses of the Letter to the Ephesians he sums up God’s plan of salvation, its fulfillment through Christ, and the heavenly inheritance of the sons and daughters of God.

Small wonder that Sister Jo chose this text for our consolation and instruction at her funeral Mass—because it is the “memory” that shaped her life and mission. Her hope, like ours today, was founded in a lively sense of God’s providential plan to gather us together as one family, saved and sanctified through the Blood of Christ.

Her hope was rooted in the blessings that flow from the Paschal Mystery we celebrate today and at every Eucharist.

***

Sister Josephine was my friend for half of my life and almost one-third of hers.  Yet thanks to her gifts as a story-teller, I know much about her childhood, her early years as a religious, and her teaching career.  And of course I was privileged to have a ring-side seat at her transition from teaching in schools to teaching just about everywhere else for another two decades.

Through all these years, she held fast to her profound conviction that Christian life begins and ends with blessings of every sort—blessings to be celebrated and blessings to be shared.

This irrepressible desire to share with others what she had herself received is in part captured in words spoken to Daniel in his vision. Certainly our first reading today echoes the mottos of both the Sisters of Saint Ann and Little Flower Academy. The Sisters’ congregational motto, taken from Matthew’s Gospel, proclaims that those who teach will be called great in Heaven.  And her beloved Little Flower carries out its mission beneath the banner Ad Lucem, which points to the shining stars mentioned in this reading.

The Gospel her Sisters chose for this celebration—Josephine herself expressed only a wish for the reading from Ephesians—provides the unifying principle of her ministries as a consecrated woman, a teacher, a catechist, and a preacher in many settings, particularly in retirement. She had a life-long commitment to the final command Jesus gave his disciples and the Church: to teach what he taught.

But despite the ways these three texts of scripture reflect her long life, I wish we could have added a fourth inspired by her latter years. That would be Romans 8:28: “we know that all things work together for good for those that love God.”  Something else Paul writes in the same chapter also describes the faith that sustained her in every difficulty: “that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us.”

Sister Josephine’s attachment to the phrase “memories are seeds of hope” was surely a source of strength to her in adversity, since a few years back she told the LFA community “memories are the seeds of hope: during the good times we forget God, but during those really difficult times we survive with God’s help.” 

It’s almost hard to remember just how many difficult times she had in the past ten years or so, because she handled them with such grace and good cheer.  Progressive loss of sight and hearing, and then mobility, were simply challenges to be overcome in faith, and overcome them she did.

In times of physical or emotional distress Sister Josephine sometimes expressed anxiety, but she never, at least in our many conversations, spoke a word of resentment or complaint.  Her confidence in Christ manifested a sure hope that he “accomplishes all things according to his counsel and will,” as St. Paul wrote.

Like many of you, I received enormous support, in good times and in bad, from her affirming notes and cards.  At the age of eighty-six she wrote me “I am like a whirling dervish so I have no time to find and send a ‘you’ kind of card.  Just remember that I love you.”

By 2007 she was already on the theme of memory. On the Feast of Saint Gregory the Great she wrote “Remember your patron’s love for the Church.  Remember your own love for the Church, and rejoice in that love.”

When my father died in 2011 she had pretty well given up writing in her own hand, so her sympathy card came in the beautiful script of one of her generous volunteer secretaries, probably Sister Helen Worth. It reads “Memories are seeds of hope.  Ponder all your memories of your life with your father. Notice that every memory is a mystery of God’s love touching you through the love of your father. In faith and hope and love he taught you to recognize the love of God, your Father.  Be glad and rejoice.”

The preacher at the prayer service last night was pretty much Sister Josephine herself, since she’d dictated a great deal of what was said.  I think that my reflections today are equally an effort to share with you something of her own message.  And in that sympathy card we find the heart of it.

So let us ponder all our memories of life with this wonderful woman.  Let us notice that every memory is a mystery of God’s love touching us through her love.  In faith and hope and love she taught us to recognize the love of God, our Father.

Be glad and rejoice.

***

On that note, I had planned to end this homily. But there was something missing, one seed of hope still to be planted.

Last night, at the end of the moving prayer vigil so beautifully planned by Josephine and so beautifully conducted by the Sisters, that seed was sown by a stranger who accepted the open invitation to speak.

A man I did not recognize came up from the back of the chapel at the very end of the service. In a voice quivering with emotion he said “I did not know who she was until I saw the notice in the paper. But I knew her, because many times I sold her bus tickets to Vancouver.”

He then recounted how she would hand him the envelope containing her allowance and ask him to take out the cost of the fare. When he offered to count out the money, she smiled and said “No, I trust you!”

His wasn’t a story of simple trust. It was a story of human dignity. How many times I heard Sister Jo talk about the employees on the bus and ferry! Each was a person to her, none was a functionary, each was valued and appreciated.

Such a small thing. But as the emotional words of Raymond from the bus depot proved, not a small thing at all.

A seed of hope. A seed planted in a human heart.

May the memory of that, and all the seeds of hope our dear sister has planted, inspire all of us to “shine like the brightness of the sky.”

February 25, 2016

Mercy the Key to a Good Lent (Sunday 5.C)

I’ll never forget talking to a young parishioner who saw me for spiritual direction before he moved to the Prairies. I asked “what are you doing for Lent?” He said very simply “Adding an extra half-hour of prayer, and giving up red meat, alcohol, and hot showers.”

I prayed fervently: “Dear Lord, please don’t let him ask me the same question!”

Most of us, if we’re honest, no longer see Lent as a big deal, if we ever did.

Certainly the numbers who come to Mass on Ash Wednesday in our parish suggest that people today value the day less than in the past. It seems, generally, that Lent doesn’t meet people’s need for a bracing wake-up call. I hear rarely about serious penance, except occasionally from young Catholics, and I certainly don’t do serious penance myself.

In a book on the Lenten liturgy, the French monk Adrian Nocent even asks whether the traditional disciplines of prayer, almsgiving and mortification or self-denial are still effective means nowadays of changing our hearts and reforming our lives.

He does think they can: that Lenten practices remain important—but says we need to go beyond thinking of Lent in terms of what we do and start thinking about what God does.

We must, Father Adrian writes, stop thinking about Lent “first and foremost in terms of ‘practices.’ We must experience it rather as a time when we open ourselves to the divine life that God seeks to restore to us.”

Prayer, almsgiving and self-denial are just keys that unlock our hearts to God’s work of restoration.

But there are also padlocks that stop us from experiencing Lent as a kind of “sacrament,” an experience that can really and truly change us.

The first of these is staying so far away from the holiness of God that we don’t realize our own unholiness. The second is thinking we’re so bad that God can’t do anything with us. And the third padlock is being afraid to tell it as it is—to admit we’re sinners and in need of God.

Our readings today show three holy men unlocking those padlocks—overcoming obstacles to receiving God’s mercy.

The prophet Isaiah draws close to God and so knows he is unworthy. St. Paul knows he’s been a great sinner, but also that he’s been made whole by grace. And St. Peter falls at the feet of Jesus confessing himself to be a sinful man.

In all three cases, the mercy of God holds them up and sends them out.

In the first reading, Isaiah has an intense experience of the majesty of God. I don’t know about you, but if I saw the Lord seated on his throne attended by angels, my first thought would be “Oh my—I’m special!”

But Isaiah, who was listening to God in prayer long before this vision, has only one immediate thought: I am not worthy.

That’s a mark of authentic religious experience: the closer we draw to God in prayer, the less convinced we become of our righteousness.

In the second reading, St. Pau l says something remarkable. “I am the least of the Apostles, unfit to be called an Apostle, because I persecuted the Church of God.”

“But,” he adds, “by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me has not been in vain.”

How beautifully Paul balances his knowledge of past sin with his gratitude for present graces! If he were around this Wednesday he would receive the ashes with mixed feelings—with sorrow for his sins but a deep sense of God’s goodness.

What’s the point of coming to Mass on Wednesday if you’ve decided you’re a hopeless cause? Sure, we are not righteous, but if we were what’s the point of Lent?

This all comes together in today’s Gospel, where St. Peter, like Isaiah, glimpses something of the glory of God, through the miraculous catch of fish. As it did with Isaiah, the experience provokes a profound sense of unworthiness in Peter, who’s quick to admit it to Jesus.

In a new book, an Italian journalist interviews Pope Francis about mercy. The Pope tells him that the first and only step required to experience mercy is to admit we need it.

That’s just what Isaiah, Peter and Paul all did. Only Paul was motivated by a memory of grievous sin; the prophet and St. Peter simply knew they were unworthy to be so close to the holiness of God.

St. Peter’s successor, Pope Francis, will no doubt have preached a terrific homily today, judging by what he says in this new book, which is called The Name of God is Mercy. The interviewer asks him how we recognize that we are sinners. He asks “What would you say to someone who doesn’t feel like one?”

The Pope doesn’t miss a beat. To someone who doesn’t feel like a sinner, he says “ask for the grace of feeling like one… because even recognizing oneself as a sinner is a grace.”

If we know ourselves as sinners, let’s walk up the aisle for the ashes on Wednesday with the confident hope of St. Paul and the deep humility of St. Peter.

But if we don’t think we’re sinners, if we feel like saying “who do you think you are, calling me dust?” then let’s come forward anyway, asking God for the grace of feeling like a sinner, so that we may begin Lent well.

And to those who are thinking “oh no, not Lent again”—to those who feel no sense of progress from last Lent or even from any Lent—Pope Francis says “The Lord never tires of forgiving: never! It is we who tire of asking him for forgiveness. We need to ask for the grace not to get tired of asking for forgiveness, because he never gets tired of forgiving.”

Ash Wednesday, in this year of mercy, is a great day for that.

Once we have removed these common obstacles, unlocked these padlocks to receiving mercy, only one thing remains: to show mercy to others. How can we receive from God what we withhold from family members, friends, enemies, colleagues, and fellow parishioners? 

Lent is a time to show mercy—for mercy, Pope Francis says, is “the beating heart of the Gospel.” It beats in the heart of Christ for each of us, but it must beat in our hearts for others.

Deacons Now a Part of Parish Life at CtR!

I haven't been able to post a Sunday homily for a couple of weeks. Two weeks ago we had fourteen of the sixteen new permanent deacons with us at Mass, and one of them preached; last Sunday I was so enthusiastic that I preached without notes.

But speaking of deacons... one of the newly-ordained preached last Saturday at the morning Mass, which the eight men now preparing for the permanent diaconate attended together with their wives. Deacon Henk Luyten, a high school principal, gave such a bracing homily that I asked if I could post it here. 

The gospel for the day was this short and rather shocking passage in Mark:   

Jesus and the disciples went home; and the crowd came together again, so that they could not even eat. When his family heard it, they went out to restrain him, for people were saying, “He has gone out of his mind.”

Here below is what Deacon Luyten shared with us. He began by thanking the parish for being so welcoming and supportive to the permanent deacons, candidates, and spouses.

            Before reflecting on our readings this morning, I would briefly like to take the opportunity to thank you personally and on behalf of all the deacons for your support and prayers. I started my journey of discernment and formation in your community some four years ago and I am now happy to be back with you to help Monsignor Smith, your pastor, in continuing our program with these fine candidates. You have sacrificed much, especially with Monsignor’s absences while he was with us. We are grateful to you and the entire Archdiocese for your support during our formation. I would ask a further favour, that you please continue to extend your warm welcome and pray for both the deacons and the candidates and our families. Again, thank you.

In this morning’s Gospel we find Jesus so busy preaching, healing and casting out demons that he doesn’t even have enough time to eat. The well behaved young carpenter who had spent most of his life living quietly surrounded by his relatives in Nazareth had suddenly become the leader of a band of twelve itinerant preachers, vagabonds to some, attracting huge crowds wherever he went. Leaving relatives and neighbours, he made his new home in a stranger’s house in a strange town, Capernaum, with fisherman and tax collectors as his new friends. When his family finally discovered this, they concluded he had gone out of his mind and set out to restrain him and perhaps bring him home. They were scandalized and embarrassed by his actions, not able to understand the changes in their native son.

Saint Thomas Aquinas, whose memorial we celebrate on Thursday, had a very similar experience, he was born into nobility and his mother had great expectations for his success in the world. Yet Thomas resolved to leave his family and join the Dominicans against the wishes of his mother. His family also thought him “out of his mind” and his brothers “restrained” him by imprisoning him in the family’s castles. But Thomas did not give in and regardless of apparent scandal to his family, set about to following his passion to the glory of God and us all.

We might ask what motivated Jesus and later Thomas to make such radical decisions, to give up so much, even to tear their families apart in times when family was the most important thing in life.

Jesus himself gives us the answer a few verses later in Mark’s Gospel. When he is told his mother and brothers (and sisters) have arrived asking for him, he responds, “Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother” (Mark 3:35). Doing God’s will, carrying out one’s mission, is decisive in the Kingdom of God. And doing God’s will very often looks crazy to the world.

Jesus teaches us a valuable lesson here. We often encounter people in our communities and even families who appear to be doing crazy, even scandalous things in our eyes or those of others. How do we respond when a daughter whom we expected to enter a prominent career or provide us with grandchildren suddenly announces that she wishes to enter a religious order? Or when a good friend suddenly tells us that he is contemplating the priesthood? I myself was surprised by the few good friends who told me that I was “out of my mind” to become a deacon at this point in my life.

And many don’t just respond this way to religious vocations but also to other countercultural behaviours such as virginity, natural family planning or even marriage, where friends and family react with “you must be out of your mind” when we or our brothers and sisters are attempting to do the will of God.

We must not allow ourselves to fall into this trap of demanding that “our own will be done”. Let us commit ourselves today to follow Jesus and do at least one thing; offer a sacrifice, support a vocation, whatever it may be, in which we too might be called “crazy” in the service of God.

The Baptism of the Lord

Blessed John Henry Newman was a man who comforted Protestants and Catholics alike during an era of dried-out theology and who tenderly invited his countrymen to hear an authentic message about God and the love he has revealed in his Church.

I’m reading a good biography of this saintly scholar, whose careful study of the teachings of the ancient Church led him to embrace the Catholic Church, abandoning the beautiful Anglican tradition that he loved so much. His bold decision brought comfort to some but conflict to many.

Newman is a reminder that comfort and tenderness—which must be hallmarks of Christian preaching, as the were of his—can only go so far. When the claims of truth conflict with our settled opinions or personal desires, the truth will hurt.

God, we know, comforts his people, just as he calls the prophet to do in our first reading. St. Paul calls the Father “the God of all consolation,” which some versions translate as “the God of all comfort.” Jesus said that he longed to gather the children of Jerusalem together, the way a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and we see him comforting his disciples on the night before he died. The Holy Spirit, of course, is called the Comforter.

In other words, it is right and good that the words of Isaiah should comfort us —that we should hear God speak tenderly to our tired hearts, our confused hearts, even our sinful hearts.

And we can claim as our own the great gifts that St. Paul talks about in the second reading: salvation, a share in the inheritance of Christ, and, in the end, eternal life.

The astonishing fact that even Jesus was baptized brings our own baptism into sharp focus; and the Gospel promise of a baptism with the Holy Spirit and fire makes us recall our confirmation. It’s easy today to feel thankful for the graces we received in baptism and conformation, and to renew the commitment that both sacraments require.

All of which could make for a good—and short—homily on this feast of the Baptism of the Lord.

But John Henry Newman would never have given such a homily. Feel-good preaching was not his way of bringing the comfort of the Gospel to the men and women of his time; he wanted them to know the whole story, to have the complete picture of the Christian life. And so he asked, in a famous sermon, what difference all this good news makes to our lives.

That is a challenging question.

Let me rephrase it. Would you live differently if you were not baptized?

Newman’s answer was, to put it mildly, pessimistic. “I really fear…” he said, that “it will be found that there is nothing we resolve, nothing we do, nothing we do not do, nothing we avoid, nothing we choose, nothing we give up, and pursue, if Christ had not died and heaven were not promised to us.”

That’s a bit tough. But throwing cold water on comfortable folks is a kindness, a sort of tenderness—a way of reviving a drooping spirit.

In another sermon, Newman tackled an even tougher question he heard people ask: why it is necessary to be holy to get to heaven? We are weak people, why are God’s standards so high? If God’s really merciful, couldn’t he have saved us without demanding holiness? Baptism alone ought to be enough.

Newman says that we really have “no right to ask this question. Surely it is quite enough for a sinner to know that a way has been opened through God’s grace for his salvation, without being informed why that way, and not another way, was chosen by Divine Wisdom,”

He further explains that eternal life is God’s gift, and undoubtedly he can set the terms on which he will give it.

There are Protestant churchgoers who doubt the necessity of baptism for salvation but who believe in the need for holiness; there are Catholics who are convinced of the necessity of baptism but who don’t quite believe in the need for holiness.

Newman tried to convince both groups of the ancient and unchangeable truth. He knew that doing what God demands could be hard at times—which is why his toughest sermon on baptism ends with a note of comfort: as we work at holiness, he preached, “it is our comfort to know… that we are not left to ourselves” but have the Holy Spirit to help us.

“It is a comfort and encouragement,” he said, “to know that God works in us and through us.”

We recognize today that we are all beloved sons and daughters of the Father; let us resolve, with his help, to do what he expects.

Epiphany: Taking Christ Seriously

In his Christmas homily, our newly-ordained assistant pastor compared the Christmas story to the latest Star Wars movie. He certainly had the congregation’s full attention—even the folks who knew little about the film got a chuckle when he revealed that I fell asleep half way through. (The movie, not the homily!)

But what if we turned things around and tried to explain today’s Gospel to visitors from another galaxy?

You’d probably have no trouble holding their attention—they'd know a whole lot about stars, and a star plays a central role in this story. The hero of the story seems to be a man called Herod—a fine fellow who takes stars seriously. And since the visitors know a little English from galactic grade school, they figure we might even get the word ‘hero’ from ‘Herod.’

I don’t need to remind you, of course, that Herod is actually the villain of the story, not the hero—unless there’s an extra-terrestrial or two in the congregation, we all know the real reason for his interest in the Christ child.

And yet I wonder whether we might learn something if we paid Herod some extra attention this morning.

Evil despot though he was, Herod got one thing right: he took the Saviour’s birth seriously. Dead seriously: he wanted to kill Christ.

Hatred, of course, is the wrong response to the Lord of Love. But it makes more sense than indifference. It’s more logical than apathy.

C. S. Lewis very famously wrote that you can shut Jesus up as a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But you cannot speak nonsense about His being a great human teacher, for Jesus has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

In other words, there are two very logical responses to the birth of Christ: one is Herod’s, the other is that of the Wise Men. Scorn him or adore him; but do not ignore him.

The Epiphany is our invitation to take Christmas seriously—to pay homage to God not only with our lips but with our lives as well. And if you think about it a little, the three Kings give us a very good example, starting with the fact that their homage was neither cheap nor easy. The gospels are vague on the details, but T.S. Eliot dramatizes them powerfully and believably in his poem The Journey of the Magi:
‘A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For the journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.’

Eliot describes all the hardships, from lazy camels to overpriced hotels. ‘A hard time we had of it’ observes one of three Kings.

Nothing has changed: the path of discipleship today will not always be convenient; we’ll have a hard journey sometimes if we follow that star.

And when we arrive and find ourselves standing before God, we may find it’s been an expensive trip. The three Kings do not arrive before Christ empty handed, and neither should we. Have we brought gifts this Christmas, or only received them?

Of course He doesn’t want gold, or frankincense or myrrh from us, but he wants the best of what we have. Our time, talent, and treasure are the only sincere ways we have of offering homage to the One who gave us everything in the first place.

With respect to time: Have we decided to give more time to prayer—which is the homage of our hearts—as a joyful response to God? Is it time to reorder our priorities between work and home?

As for our talents: Have we considered whether we are doing enough to serve others, our church, and our community? 

As for treasure: Do we see Christ still naked and helpless in places in the world that need our material support? Are we generously giving to support the Church’s mission at home and abroad? The answers to such simple questions may reveal whether Christmas has really touched our hearts—whether we’re taking it seriously.

The Epiphany is called in some Catholic cultures the feast of the three Kings. But we mustn’t forget that there are four kings in the story: three Kings and Herod. But there are no bystanders, no-one who sees the star and goes back to an ordinary life. Shepherds and Wise Men alike are filled with joy.

If Christmas has passed like a blur, let’s slow down today and gaze at the star that fills the night sky over Bethlehem—a star that guides, invites, and challenges us to believe.

Feast of the Holy Family

My first pastor told me that my shortest homily of the year should be the Sunday after Christmas.

A priest friend said his first pastor told him his shortest homily should be on January 1.

I’m not sure who was right, so I try to preach as briefly as possible on both days!

It’s easy enough to be brief on the feast of the Holy Family. This day has many lessons to teach us, but they are simple and straightforward.

The first lesson comes from the Gospel, which tells us that even the best of families meets both joy and sorrow.

What a good time Mary and Joseph must have had in Jerusalem! They had celebrated Passover with relatives and friends, and their trip home would be much like the drives back from Christmas at my grandmother’s—weary but happy and contented by the festivities.

Then suddenly fear and anxiety interrupt this happy holiday. Even today there is no greater panic than a lost child, but imagine three days of that terror in a society much more dangerous than our own.

When that’s over, Mary and Joseph suffer something most families know very well—a breakdown in communications. What they say to Jesus is perfectly reasonable, but his truthful reply is impossible for them to understand.

St. Luke wants us to know the story does not end with that standoff. He adds quickly that Jesus returned home and obeyed his parents. It’s a happy ending, at least. But the story reminds us that it’s not possible to avoid all conflict in any family.

Expecting a perfect family, free of misunderstanding and pain, is a recipe for bitterness; accepting the realities of family life, and seeking always more to understand than to be understood, is the realistic path that leads to the reasonable level of happiness that is all we can expect in an imperfect world.

A second lesson comes from the first reading, which reminds parents that children are not their own. Hannah surrenders her son Samuel to the Lord because she knows the Lord has given him to her in the first place.

As a general attitude, this is important—because claiming ownership of any human being is asking for trouble. We don’t even own ourselves, as St. Paul taught when he told the Romans that no-one lives for himself and no-one dies for himself because we are the Lord’s (cf. Rm 14:7-8).

So if we don’t own ourselves, we certainly don’t own others, even our children. Parents have enormous rights and duties in regard to their children, but there are firm limits. Hannah offers Samuel to the service of the prophet Eli not only to pay a vow to God, but because she knows her son is called to this—he has, we would say today, a vocation.

Parents can learn from Hannah that God has the first claim to their children, which sometimes means being willing to surrender our plans for them so that they can follow God’s call.

Finally, we learn a great lesson from the second reading when St. John says “We are children of God.” We have all the same Father so we’re all part of two families—the one into which we were born and the family of God.

It’s interesting to see where St. John goes with this. He doesn’t emphasize the prestige or the benefits of being children of God—he goes straight to the place where this morning’s Gospel ends: obedience.

Children have a natural and supernatural duty to obey their parents. This homily might be over the heads of the younger members of the congregation, but they all understand they need to do what their parents tell them to do. So it is with each member of the family of God, since through his Son, Jesus Christ, the Father has clearly taught us what he expects.

We obey God’s commandments for a number of good reasons, but today’s second reading gives the best reason of all: because it pleases him. What a simple a lesson that is! Children also obey their parents for a number of reasons, even fear of punishment, but the best reason is because it brings joy to their mothers and fathers.

Celebrating the Holy Family of Nazareth comes naturally at Christmastime. But today’s feast invites us also to think supernaturally about our own families, praying not for perfect families but for holy ones, created in God’s image and following his laws amidst the joys and sorrows of daily life. 

The image above is purloined from the website of the artist, iconographer and author Michael O'Brien, who has devoted much of his talent and time to promotion of the family. Judging by its title, "The Family - 2," it represents not the Holy Family but a holy family, blessed by the loving hands of Christ.

What Does Christmas Have To Do With Self-esteem??

Our staff party for St. Anthony’s School started this year with a Christmas quiz.

I was stumped by the very first question: what do Santa’s helpers learn in school? But the grade seven teacher answered right away: the elf-abet.

I figured the schoolchildren would get a laugh from that, so I asked them the question the next morning. I was about to call on their clever teacher when a grade seven girl put up her hand.

She answered: elf-esteem!

You might think that’s an unusual introduction to my Christmas homily, but Father Paul started his by explaining the theology of Star Wars! Actually, I thought it was a brilliant homily until he got to the part about my falling asleep during the movie. I thought he might have skipped that…

Let’s go back to the student’s answer. It’s quite clever, because modern teachers, whether in North Vancouver or at the North Pole, work hard to teach self-esteem. There are all kinds of lesson plans and ideas to help youngsters, and it’s certainly an important goal.

But teaching children they are special, and helping them value themselves and their gifts only goes so far. What happens to the youth or adult who realizes he or she isn’t very special at all?

And what about the person whose pain, physical or mental, makes it almost impossible to affirm the goodness of their existence?

Or even worse, what happens to the person whose self-esteem is shattered by failure, betrayal or sin?

Christmas, the miracle we celebrate tonight, has an answer to all of these crucial questions.

In our first reading, the prophet Isaiah proclaims a great light. But before he says a word about the light, he speaks about the darkness. The darkness that engulfed ordinary people. Not bad people, but ordinary people, living in a land of deep darkness.

On them light has shone.

Isaiah was writing some eight centuries before the birth of Christ, and his prophetic words applied to his own time. But they apply to us as well, as we can tell from the phrase “from this time onward and forevermore.” His prophecy is a promise we all can claim.

And that promise changes everything about our lives, especially in the dark corners where we can’t see things clearly. The promised light offers the only self-esteem that nothing can take away, because it’s not grounded in what we can do but in who we are.

And who we are has been made known to us, just as “this thing that has taken place” was made known to the shepherds in the fields. We are brothers and sisters of “a Saviour, who is the Christ, the Lord.”

The consequences of this—God becoming one of us—are almost too hard to grasp. Writing in the fourth century, St. Athanasius said “the Son of God became man so that we might become God.”

If his words weren’t repeated in the Catholic Catechism, I couldn’t bring myself to believe them. But I do, and an unavoidable conclusion flows from them. Our self-esteem acquires its highest, its richest, and its most indestructible form on this holy night.

The birth of Christ is not good news just for religious people. As the angels told the shepherds, it is “good news of great joy for all the people.”

Listen to what the shepherds say to one another when the angels leave: “Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us.”

Are they convinced? Have they figured it all out? Not likely, given what the shepherds call the event that the angels have announced: “this thing that has taken place.” Many of us also are a bit confused about what it all means, even if we do not doubt what happened.

So let us rush to the stable along with the shepherds. Let us find Mary and Joseph and their child, tonight, and see not a myth or even a mere historical event; with eyes of hope let us see healing for our wounded self-esteem, restoration of the dignity that others have taken away from us or which we have surrendered freely.

Look at the child in the manger and see your brother, your own flesh and blood, God who has brought salvation to you and to all.

Look at the Christ child and see yourself as God wants you to be—“godly” is the word St. Paul uses in our second reading. The grace of God that has appeared in Christ teaches and empowers us “to live lives that are self-controlled, upright and godly.”

Whatever has robbed you of true self-esteem, accept it back as the best Christmas gift of all.

Some of us have found great peace by working with professional counsellors, who can be a real blessing and bring much help to wounded spirits. But we should start with the one who is named Wonderful Counsellor and Prince of Peace. He who breaks the yoke that weighs us down, and shatters the bars that oppress us is the true source of self-esteem.

But our Christmas thoughts must not focus too much on ourselves, important though it is to know how much we are loved by God. Let’s end with a look at the bigger picture. The future of the world depends greatly on our rediscovering our human dignity and worth.

“If man is not made in the image of God, nothing then stands in the way of inhumanity,” the Protestant theologian Francis Schaeffer wrote more than thirty years ago.

He continued “There is no good reason why mankind should be perceived as special. Human life is cheapened. We can see this in many of the major issues being debated in our society today: abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, the increase of child abuse and violence of all kinds, pornography ..., the routine torture of political prisoners in many parts of the world, the crime explosion, and the random violence which surrounds us.” 

It sounds all too familiar today, and Francis Schaeffer’s somber words are not out of place on Christmas night—because they cry out for the rediscovery of the nobility of our human nature.

So whether you’re worried about the world or about yourself, let the light of Christmas truth shine on your problem. Go now to Bethlehem to find the source of your greatest dignity—God made man, that men might become God.