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writes: “Where is the newborn king of the Jews?” I think he is hidden, not in the stars only, but in
the less spectacular events of our daily life, in our mundane struggles to just get through the day,
to earn a living and care for our families. He is also hidden on the margins of society where the
poor, the lonely, the depressed, the abandoned and the victims of violence in all forms struggle
for the daily bread of kindness and hope. We don’t see the “newborn king” because we are not
looking for the Light or are distracted by the garish and often tawdry distractions of our consumer
-crazed society. In a Christmas-New Year-Epiphany Letter to his friends last year, Fr. Bob Bon-
not, who at 70-years-old pastors two parishes in Ohio, writes: “At other times we don’t see be-
cause we don’t want the intrusion of Light lest he call us out of darkness. We’d rather live with
our illusions and half-truths than struggle with the Truth. Half-truths and illusions, reinforced by
whatever tendentious reinforcements we select to surround us, imprison. Only Truth, Light, makes
us free. But we have to be willing to look, see and respond honestly to what we see.”
If Christ’s Light shines through us and we become transmitters of that Light, our little corner of
the world will be transformed and the darkness will be overcome. In his
letter to the Colossians, St Paul says that as followers of Christ we need
to be clothed in sincere compassion, in kindness and humility, in gentle-
ness and patience, and that we need to bear with each and forgive each
other. And over all these “clothes” we need to put on love and always be
thankful. If in this New Year, we made a sincere effort to follow Paul’s
advice, we would slowly change the world that surrounds each of us as
we make the Light of Christ more visible to those living in darkness.
Prayer
“If the whole world were only capable of grasping this principle that true
happiness consists only in the freedom of disinterested love – the ability
to get away from ourselves, and our limited sphere of interests and ap-
petites and needs, and rejoice in the good that is in others, not because
it is also ours, but formally in so far as it is theirs!”
-Thomas Merton
Raids on the Unspeakable
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Gerry Straub
Parishioner