December 21, 2003

This Sunday fittingly coincides with the “shortest” day of the year. The darker it gets, the clearer is the Light of the World. “The Light shines in the darkness and the darkness has never overcome it” (John 1:5). The day of the Winter Solstice has the same number of hours as other days, but it seems shorter because we are meant to be children of light. This light is our moral dignity, and the failure of physical light is a parable of the darkness of sin. Life is full — and days are fullest — when filled with the light of grace. Electric Christmas lights and tinsel create an illusion of a real joy only Christ can give.

The four weeks of Advent are the Church’s proclamation of the mysteries of Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell. If you ignore these, the happiness of Christmas is superficial. We have had a most blessed Advent in the parish, and I trust that this portends many graces in the New Year of Grace. It is our job to shed the Light of Christ in our neighborhood (I hope symbolically to do this by lighting up the church tower which has been darkened for a long time), and this can only be done by “putting aside the works of darkness.” Confessions unite our earthly happiness with the unending joy of Heaven: “There is much joy in Heaven over one sinner who repents” (Luke 15:7).

We have recently seen stark contrasts between light and dark in our world: in moral offences against God sanctioned even by civil courts and some sects that profess to be Christian; in terrorism and abuse of innocent life; in the persecution and enslavement of our fellow Christians in many lands. We have also seen saints canonized and the defeat of tyrants. Christianity is not an option because Christ is not an option. A right celebration of the Twelve Days of Christmas is a public acceptance of Christ as Lord and Saviour. Pope Gregory the Great declared this in words which should be repeated yearly:

“For unless the new man, by being made in the likeness of sinful flesh, had taken on himself the nature of our first parents, unless he had stooped to be one in substance with his mother while sharing the Father’s substance and, being alone free from sin, united our nature to his, the whole human race would still be held captive under the domination of Satan. The Conqueror’s victory would have profited us nothing if the battle had been fought outside our human condition. But through this wonderful blending the mystery of new birth shone upon us, so that through the same Spirit by whom Christ was conceived and brought forth we too might be born again in a spiritual birth.”

Fr. George W. Rutler