My Weekly Blurb - Scripture for Today

Welcome to Saint Mary's parish for Christmas. We have a number of communities within the parish who will celebrate Christ's birth each in a different way. There are the Masses in English at St Columba's and St Mary's as well as in Malayalam for the Syro-Malabar community and the Mass in the Extraordinary Form (Latin) which is also at St Columba's. The multi-ethnic community of all these Mass times speaks of the universal significance of the birth of Jesus Christ and the potential of faith in him to unite the whole human family.

This holiday, however, can mean many things to different people as you will all be aware. Yet, here we are to participate in the Catholic Mass. God can be frightening. Religion, too, can fill people with trepidation. Spiritual realities are beyond our control and yet they stir up great passions and convictions - even terrorism and violence. Not only that, most of the time, these personal or collective experiences of the spiritual such as awe, love and beauty are conveyed in stories and literature from long ago by people who themselves were caught up in the awesome mystery of life. This can be diifficult to comprehend especially in a context of loss, evil or suffering.

One option is to turn away or even to label anything to do with faith and things unseen as a delusion. Richard Dawkins famously wrote a book entitled The God Delusion. Nevertheless, having mocked the attempts of others to articulate their experience of the transcendent and what it means to be human he, in turn, has the temerity to write his autobiography! I hope he has a scientific experiment to prove every element of his life story and can point to the genes that obliged him to write about it! This includes the gene that told him to marry his wife or to tell others they are deluded in believing that God exists or indeed the opposite. I wonder what she thinks?

How do I/we give voice to our faith and experience of God, family, life, faith death, suffering, gratitude, etc? Are we deluded? I say we are not deluded but at the same time we know we are limited. It is only through prayers, songs, symbols, gifts, decorations, meals and other activities that we can give voice to our inmost longings and our shared hope with others. participation in the Eucharist is one of these moments. The desires, placed in our hearts by the One who summoned us into existence, therefore find a moment of fulfilment in our Christmas worship. In the end it is all about the desire to love and be loved as well as the infinite generosity of the God, revealed to us in Jesus, as Abba - Daddy. .

The wonderful thing about the Mass is that it is not our prayer only above all it is the prayer of Christ. We cannot and need not plumb the depths of the mystery of Emmanuel - God with us. I invite you this Christmas simply to raise your hearts and minds to God and let him do the work. We are, after all, saved by grace. In our weakness and frail humanity we can trust that God still has the power to work in and through us, even as he did with the shepherds, to give glory to God on this sacred night. "Likewise, the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. " (Rom 8: 26-27)