Petersboat

If we would be truly wise, yes. By God's grace, a man can surrender his gold for the treasures offered to us in Christ, his frankincense for the true prayer that Christ shares with us, and even his own definitions of rest, which Christ also transcends and transfigures. And in fact, man must. Only then will he depart for his country by a different way, changed and intent on peace with his neighbors.

Believing in miracles is essential to our Faith, since the Sacraments are all miracles. But it's still more important to ask what God may be trying to say to us through the specific signs He sends to us in our own days.

I suppose most parents will say to their children, "You can be whatever you want to be when you grow up," but I don't imagine that Our Lady and Saint Joseph said such things to Jesus.

A little boy came to me after Mass yesterday, showing me a gold key in a red bag. It turned out to be a good way of understanding the intercession of the Blessed Mother. This is a teaching on Our Lady, the Blessed Virgin Mary, and how she desires to help us to stay close to her Son.

An unexpected introduction to a man and his son at a Christmas party has led me to a deeper knowledge of Jesus. I begin and end this 3rd Advent reflection with that story.

Last week, we spoke of emptying ourselves of the spirit of the world in order to make room for the Holy Spirit. In this episode, we'll move into a word about the knowledge of the self that the Holy Spirit makes possible.

This is the first part of a four-week spiritual preparation for Christmas, beginning with a word (based on the Mass readings for the First Sunday of Advent) about making room in our hearts for Christ.

The Feast of Christ the King was established by Pope Pius XI in 1925 to implore all people - especially leaders of totalitarian states - to allow Christ to reign in their hearts, that He might direct their thoughts and actions according to the Father's will for peace's sake. But since peace is begotten by God, not made by man, it is by the forgiveness of sin that man is then poised to bring God's peace to the world.

The title's a bit click-baity, but it was either that or "Sure Feels Like the End Sometimes," which also seemed a bit of a ploy. In any case, this Sunday's readings prepared us for Christ's return to judge the living and the dead, because next weekend is the Feast of Christ the King, which will bring with it the end of the liturgical year and a foreshadowing of the end of all things. My hope, here, was to say that by growing in our awareness of how Christ is already with us, we can be relieved of any fear of His coming again in glory - or even our own death.

I propose, in this homily, a way of understanding the kind of help that Jesus is trying to offer us. It seems to me that he dwells in us in order to help us make sense of our thoughts and feelings, which are often wrong - thank God.