Reflection for December 15
Advent is a time for us to ask: Where is God in our life? That was the point of Father Robert Manning’s homily at the Sunday 10 pm Mass on December 13, 1981, at my alma mater, Holy Cross. It was the last Sunday Mass before we all went home for the Christmas break. Father Manning used imaginative prayer with his homily to place us in Bethlehem nearly 2000 years ago. And once there he had us going about our usual day-to-day routines while the town was filled with those coming to register for the census. It was while doing these familiar and typical daily tasks that God, in the form of Jesus, came into the world. Father Manning’s question remains with me all these years later: did we notice it?
The take-home message from Father Manning was this: God comes to us in the everyday ordinariness of our lives. To see God, we must be attentive to the extraordinary that encompasses what we might mistake to be everyday ordinariness.
That homily and the take-home message came to mind when I read today’s gospel. People are coming to John the Baptist and asking him, “𝑊ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑠ℎ𝑜𝑢𝑙𝑑 𝑤𝑒 𝑑𝑜?” to be ready for the Messiah. And John’s answer is quite simple: take care of the ordinary tasks that God has placed in front of you; give your extra coat to the person next to you who needs one; share your food with the person beside you who is hungry; help those around you; do not look at the person in front of you and think how you could enrich yourself at their expense. Or as Jesus summed it all up: love your neighbor as yourself. I know I have found God by being attentive to what is taking place with the people around me.
So, for the remainder of this Advent and beyond, let’s look for the coming of Jesus in the ordinary yet extraordinary encounters that God graces us with each day.
Tim Curran