By Sister Elise Saggau
As we grow, develop, and age, we understand better and better that what our hearts desire cannot be attained by working harder, by having more experiences, by having more stuff. What we yearn for is GIFT, something we cannot earn. The fact is we have already received that gift—our life—given freely and without charge. We never really get to the end of receiving this gift, however. We always need to wait and watch and ask and expect and get ready for the more that is to come. With Saint Augustine, we realize that our hearts will always be restless until they rest in God.
This is an issue of hope. Hope may be the most crucial virtue for our times. When we look at the world around us, we are tempted to say: Is there any way that things are getting better and not worse? How does our faith in Jesus Christ help us live in the world in a way that matters, that helps, that brings the whole human enterprise forward? Do I personally matter at all?
We are not able to deal with such hard questions alone. For questions like this, we need a community of people who share a common faith and who tell a common story rooted in faith. Christians believe that God has come among us as one of us in the person of Jesus Christ. In Jesus, God shares our lot with us. In Jesus, God experiences this difficult and bewildering journey of human life with us. Jesus is our human brother even as he is our divine Lord with power to save us from our own destructive inclinations.
But we live in a world where darkness seems to have a great advantage. We adjust to it much as we adjust to being in a dark theater. Our eyes get used to the darkness—we eat our popcorn, drink our soda, move around, and enjoy the movie. That’s fine in a theater, but not so fine in our lives. It is not fine to adjust to the darkness of our times, the darkness of our own minds and hearts. It is not fine to believe that, since there is not much we can do about it, we should get as comfortable with it as we can.
But what happens when we leave the darkened theater? What happens when we decide to move out of the darkness to which we have adjusted? We are like the people Isaiah the prophet described when he proclaimed: “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light” (Is. 9:2). Perhaps the light blinds us at first; but our wonderful eyes begin to adjust. We become like the prophets—people who see! With them, we see how things are, but also we see how things might be. We understand that there is a greater reality that is always at hand: the God who loves; the God who saves. We understand that, while God does not always prevent disasters from happening, God is always with us to see us through. And there will always be a “through”! This is the absolute message of Christmas!
