by Fr. O'Brien
It has been too long since my last communication with you. The reason is (among others!) that I have been reading St. Thomas deeply, and he makes my efforts to express the great truths of our faith so trivial in contrast to his splendid power. However, I must agree with Chesterton that "what is worth doing is worth doing badly."
Our Advent season is almost half way through its course. It is a time of great grace in the growth of our interior life, which is the perfection of our life. Of course, it is the calling to mind of the great event of our Redeemer's first breath of our daily air, and of the intimacy of His involvement with us that that breath expresses. It also involves memories of our childhood, mixed sometimes, I fear, with sadness—for we seemed more capable of joy then than now. For this the fault is ours, not His.
Our fault consists precisely in this: that we fail or, perhaps, refuse to see that Advent is an event in our own lives; that the Christ, through whom we exist and have our being, is, in a special way at this time, attempting an advent into our life of consciousness. He would show us the way to our full maturity, and enable us to achieve the joy of complete perfection—a joy that no one else can give and which no one else can take away. But like Jerusalem whose children he would gather "as a hen gathers her chickens under her wings," we procrastinate or refuse. Our excuses are many.
There is, first, the intimidating fact that many learned scientists not only reject Christ, but reject the very possibility of the existence of God. They have supporting them a mighty propaganda machine. But there are many other scientists, eminent in their fields, who know that their probes cannot reach even the internal structure of the atom. They know that there are vast areas of truth, including the existence of the atom itself, which cannot be touched by their methodology. These are the men who are guided by reason in their experiments and in their expressions. The others are children playing dangerous games in the marketplace of man. They need supervision.
The most formidable obstacles to our welcoming of Christ are within ourselves. They are our worldly and uncontrolled passions, and the sins that flow from them. Concupiscence leads us to prefer pleasures of the body and the table over God, and fear in the pressure of evil and the absence of anger to enable us to fight for the good result from the irascible passions. The capital sins are pride, covetousness, lust, abusive anger, gluttony, envy and sloth. In Eden these passions and sins were subject to reason. In our fallen state we are outgunned without Christ.
First, speaking to us as a fellow human being, He reveals to us the love of His Father, His own love for us, and finally His identity with His Father. The Gospels and the messianic prophecies must become part of our minds, for in them is revealed, more perfectly than Shakespeare could do, the Person and personality of Christ. St. John gives the reason: "these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing, you may have life in His name." In Him all things are centered; from Him all things flow: our existence, our gifts, all that we have and are, all the good that we do. Even our sins He took upon Himself on the Cross.
From the Cross through Mass and Sacraments He enriches and elevates us through the riches of His grace. Through the indwelling of His Spirit He makes us one with Himself as He and the Father are one. He raises us to the splendor of the supernatural through the theological virtues of faith, hope and charity. He enables us to be at home in the supernatural through the gifts of His Spirit. He give us delight in the things of God through the fruits of His Spirit. Through the indwelling of His Spirit, He also raises to the supernatural level of the acquired cardinal virtues, which we have tried to develop.
Because we are true secondary causes and His essential collaborators in the work of our salvation, we must make watchful efforts to avoid evil and embrace good in our daily lives. We cannot avoid all evil in a world as lost as ours is, but we must not, like fools, desire encounters with evil. They who willingly desire evil have exiled themselves from the love of God and from all that it involves. Choices determine the very structure of our nature, even the very "wiring" of the brain itself—according to recent scientific research.
As causes of our own state of being, we should read good spiritual writings, pray, study and practice the virtues, and thus permit the joy that our faith can bring to take root and to flourish in us. If we work as true partners of God our lives will be more orderly, i.e., more beautiful, our passions will learn obedience to the truth, and we will, even here on earth, become more like Christ, for we will begin to see Him as He is—a condition that St. John used to describe Heaven! St. Thomas teaches that if we permit grace, with its virtues, gifts and fruits of Christ's Spirit to come to us, we will be able to avoid sin completely. We may never reach that glorious state, but is should be our objective.
Christ's Advent is all that I have attempted to describe. Some of you may think that is a strange way to express Christmas joy. It is not. If what I have described were impossible, my world would be cruel. But the special joy of Christmas is found in the fact that all I have described is possible in Christ and, in fact, is described by Him as easy—for He said "my yoke is easy and my burden light." The child will grow to be a man, will suffer and die and rise from the tomb to show His love for us and to open for us the gates of heaven, closed by Sin.
Let the warmth of our hearts compensate for the cold of the stable, and so provide for Him the dwelling where He wishes to be.
May you truly be blessed this Christmas.
