767 ELM STREET * ROCKY HILL * CONNECTICUT 06067
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767 ELM STREET * ROCKY HILL * CONNECTICUT 06067 |
           
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The great America writer, Carl Sandberg once wrote, “The birth of every child is God’s message that the world should go on.” Today we have the story of Mary visiting Elizabeth. Both women are pregnant. Elizabeth is pregnant with John the Baptist and Mary with Jesus. John will proclaim the One who is to come and he acknowledges the One who is to come by leaping for joy in the womb at the voice of Mary. Why a leap for joy? Because in Jesus all that humanity hopes for is made physically and visibly real in the womb of the Blessed Mother. Hope resides “ in utero” waiting to be born in the world. Mary is vessel, a bearer of hope and she reminds us that we are too are to be bearers of hope-bringing to the world the good news that the Lord is coming to us to fulfill our deepest yearnings for real life. But what is hope? One writer, Eugene Peterson put is this way: Hoping does not mean doing nothing. It is not fatalistic resignation. It means going about our assigned tasks, confident that God will provide the meaning and the conclusion. It is not compelled to work away at keeping up appearances with a bogus spirituality. It is the opposite of desperate and panicky manipulations, of scurrying and worrying. And hoping is not dreaming. It is not spinning an illusion or fantasy to protect us from our boredom or our pain. It means a confident, alert expectation that God will do what he said he would. It is imagination put in the harness of faith. It is a willingness to let God do it in his way and in his time. It is the opposite of making plans that demand that God put into effect, telling him both how and when to do it. We see this in the Blessed Mother. Her confident faith does not ask for the details as to how all this will play out. She submits to the will of God leaving the fulfillment of the promise to the One that gave the promise in the first place. She hoped even in what she could not see. But this was not a stupid hope. Her hope was grounded in the God if Israel that had made promises before and had kept them in concrete manifestations of his liberating love for people. Yes, the message of Hope that we bring is one of liberation breaking into the world. But, for some it is dangerous. Hope is like that. It has two sides, like the moon. The dangerous side of hope is the announcement that the present order of things is not the last word. Hope is a call to all who profit from the present order of things at the expense of others to change their hearts so that they can share in God’s future. The injustice, the master-slave relationships in our world, poverty, war and all things that seek to crush the human person and the creation are living on borrowed time. In Jesus Christ, the Father announces a hope that says that all those forces that seek to crush life are not the last word. Herein is the liberating quality of Hope. For hope tell us that something new is coming; something that fulfills our deepest longings for peace and wholeness. For Christians this means being bearers of hope in a concrete manifesting of hope by challenging the right of evil, suffering and injustice to exist. It consists of a life of generosity, forgiveness, justice-seeking and peacemaking borne of the joy of God’s unconditional love for all. Now that is hope, and that is what gives hope to the world. And so our lives become a living proclamation of hope to the world-a hope that reminds us that in our faithful surrender to the will of God all things will work the way they are meant to work. Hope in faith tells us that God’s will for freedom and liberation will be made manifest to the world through a people, that like the Blessed Mother, utters a “yes” to the Divine initiative to be vessels of God’s saving power in the world. Deacon Robert M. Pallotti, D.Min. Return to Saint James Home Page |