God Sends Us His Divine Child
Sunrise at St. Anthony Shrine and Friary
I was reminiscing on the phone with a former friar yesterday. He remembered that during night prayer on Friday nights in novitiate we would use Psalm 88: "my one companion is darkness." He laughed and told me that when he leaves his family in the morning it's dark, and when he returns home, it's dark. He tells his family that "his one companion is darkness." He wasn't quite sure if they would get it.
Well, I’d have to agree that these days are quite short, and the night long. I rise by 5:15 a.m., stumble about as I head down the hall, which seems longer at that hour, for the bathroom. After Morning Prayer with the community, the sun, still sleepy, pulls itself up from the horizon. When snow clouds are absent, there is a palette of color starting with deep mauve trees, merging with a lighter blue, fading to rose before that sun drags itself up over this spectrum of purple.
Yes, there’s a beauty in this season of Advent, an expectation in the air. Of course, we’re busy with Christmas cards and cookies, presents and punch. But there’s a deeper longing present in most of us. That desire is really for The Desire of Nations, the Light of the World, whose birth we celebrate at the end of this month. There is much that is dark in our world. We hold our breath that Gaza’s fragile peace will hold. We know the pain in our cities of unemployment, mediocre education, homelessness. All of these create the sense that our “only companion is darkness”.
Perhaps that is why Jesus was born metaphorically in the middle of the night in medieval minds. Just when it seems that darkness wins, God sends us this Divine Child. Our lives are turned over by this one, holy night. And we who desire to receive Him, then become the new conveyors of this Good News. Like shepherds we are sent back to those we are charged to care for. It might be our own parents, a sick child, that person at work who stamps on my last nerve. Yes, the night will shine like the day as one by one we become the stars that shine with the presence of Christ.
May the beauty and dark lead all of us to the Creator of the Stars of Night, and to a merry Christmas.
Fr. Mark Soehner, OFM,
Provincial Councilor
Nativity at the Shrine
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