NIGHT OF FEAR AND GLADNESS

NIGHT OF FEAR AND GLADNESS

“You will find a baby wrapped in swaddling clothes.”

Would there be room for you and me around that manger in the crib? Can we claim a place among the angels and shepherds? The angels marvelled at the glory of God, which they could see, and that sight called forth their special song, “Glory to God in the highest.” The shepherds were the first among us to see the Child, and on “seeing him they discovered the truth of what had been told them about this child.” But the shepherds did not see what the angels saw, nor do we share the vision which the angels relished. We do not see God as he is, for no man can see him and live. The greatness of his majesty is too much for our frailty. We could not bear or dare to see him face to face, until prepared and strengthened to do so.

In the presence of that little Child we are at peace, like the shepherds. We are not overwhelmed. Now we too look at the child and perceive the truth of what has been told about him. We see one thing: a little child. We believe another: God made man. We do not see what the angels saw, but we believe what the shepherds understood and even more than they, as our faith grows stronger and more clear. Faith, not sight, makes us sing the angels’ song: “Glory to God in the highest.” The song of blind people who have not seen but have heard the good news, and believed. And there is a gentle peace in the singing of that song. It is the peace that comes from giving glory to God, of reaching beyond where thought and word can take us into God’s world. The humble sing for they have generous hearts, hearts moved by God beyond the weakness of their minds.

“Do not be afraid. Look, I bring you news of great joy, a joy to be shared by the whole people.”

“Why should I rejoice?” My life projects no day when I shall keep from tears, pain, anxiety, and fatigue. Ask me not where I have pain but where I don’t !  If God be the goodness, which is claimed for him, if he has that love for us, which no human love can match, then why does evil seem to rule our hearts and hold sway in his creation? There is no answer beyond the gentle assurance: “Rejoice, do not be afraid.”

Terror comes when we see no escape from the darkness that surrounds us, when we see no light. Terror is the child of despair, ugly and cruel. Yet when terror holds us in its vice, hope is often born. Darkness yields to light. A Saviour has been born, the Lord Jesus Christ himself, for “God so loved the world that he sent his only Son so that those who believe in him may not perish, but have eternal life” (John 3,6).

“Do not be afraid.” We need never be alone. Every burden carried by us is also shared by him. “Give me your burden,” he says, “and I shall make it mine.” He will not always lift the load from us, but being his too, it is lighter now and sweeter. We do not understand why we are fallen and sinful, weighted and wounded. Yet he does not will our sadness or pain, but wants us to know his goodness, and to trust, to find his love and rejoice. The secret hidden in his word will be opened to us. It is the secret of his love, warm, close and true. That love is the meaning of his life, the significance of his being. It is the reason of his mission when he came to us man.

There is deep in the heart of each of us a longing  -  it is a longing to understand the meaning of our lives and the lives of others. It is also a longing for happiness, contentment, joy, call it what you will. We go on waiting and expecting, each day, that the riddles of life will at last be solved. Tomorrow we shall secure that happiness that eludes us today; hoping till the word of the enigma is delivered at our doorstep.

The years that have been were a long advent, a looking forward to that day when the dreams of what might be become a reality. It is, after all, community in God for which we ache, though often we do not know it. There is an experience of love here, a moment of bliss there, like heralds announcing what will be, when we shall know only God and find in him the fullness of contentment. The time for that is not yet. We must wait. But in the meantime we have the Child.

He comes each year into our midst, to those of us who prepare our minds for the festival of Christmas. It is the feast of his coming once in time, God becoming man, so that we, with hope and courage, may continue on our pilgrim way, which will lead one day to the vision of him in whom is our eternal happiness.

How wonderful that we are one with the people who lived in Palestine at the time of Jesus’ birth ! How beautiful that we can continue singing the angels’ song in a spirit of faith, with the eagerness of hope, and with hearts full of love !  For we know that the story of Christ can repulse the forces of destruction which rage against out earthly habitations and our inmost selves, bring security amidst dizzying changes, sift the chattering messages that confuse our minds, and still the fears that threaten to devour us. But only if we believe it is true. It is not enough to sing the carols out of habit like an endless track in a shopping centre, to go through the rituals like touching a talisman, or to pass on the story like an Aesop’s fable. Simply as a story it might not survive, for it is not in essence a nice story. But as a true story it is many times more powerful than all the awesome forces that 21^st. century man can muster. They can change the world; this story can change them. Yet whether or not that change will come depends on whether we look into the Bethlehem stable as outsiders intrigued by a curiosity, or enter it and read the world outside through the eyes of the Child who is at once true God and true man.

Only there can we know ourselves as we really are, the world as it really is, our future as it really can be. It is a raw and painful knowledge, like birth itself, painful but promising, and, like that birth, with power over all waves and winds, whether of earth or the spirit, bringing not just fleeting comfort but lasting, ever lasting confidence, security and peace. To the awesome problems of man the awesome answer is that God has pitched his tent among men, “entirely of one build and unaltered,” the same today, yesterday and forever.

CHRISTMAS SILENCE

CHRISTMAS SILENCE

The celebration of Christmas is a celebration of God’s presence. It is meant to herald the advent of inner peace and stillness. Though we celebrate this event by the singing of Silent Night and other traditional carols that speak of peace, stillness and tranquillity, our present world is defined by signs to the contrary. Christmas becomes an annual ritual, a kind of comic relief, giving us the much needed break we need. Even as we put on a happy face, we might often feel empty. We just want to put behind us, to blot out from memory the unpleasantness, the hurt, the anger; and get on with life, hoping that things will change eventually.

            In our anxiety, we tend to take refuge in silence, but it is a silence that is burdensome, enforced by circumstances, a silence born of despair, of a sense of powerlessness, of our inability to change the situation. It is also the silence of the eccentric, the naïve, and the gullible, the exploited, and those of us who live at the margins. Nevertheless, it enables us to get on with life, allowing us to keep our daily routines, while our energies are steadily depleted by underlying fear. Silence is often mistaken for resilience.

             There are some who are silent because they have long since understood that words lose their meaning when they become endless chatter. They have experienced first hand that words, whether written or spoken, are often meant to conceal more than they reveal. And when there is a genuine attempt to reveal what we experience deeply, we find words inadequate. We are often misunderstood and misquoted and our intentions twisted out of context. For the sensitive, silence is a defence mechanism, aimed at damage control. We might be misunderstood but never misquoted.

            A silence that is imposed by external conditions is unproductive, because it is rooted in the experience of ourselves as non-being. It is the very antithesis of presence. It masks the inner turmoil, the noises within us that clamour for attention, giving us a false sense of security. The other is seen as a threat to our existence. It is one ego battling for survival against another at every level of our personal and social life. It is a recipe for internal and external war and violence of varying intensity.

            The inner silence that Christmas promises is not a commodity that we can seek to possess. Possession supposes separateness. We want what we do not have. Possessiveness presupposes a dualistic world, in which we can at most have working relationships but never an enduring peace. Presence, on the other hand, is rooted in non-duality. It is the experience of the dissolution of the self into the larger Self which enfolds us. This ‘kenosis’ – emptying of the self – that makes Christmas a sacrament. It is not only a sign that God is with us, but even more an expression of the reality that we are one with God and as a result one with each other.

            Christmas is a journey to our centre where we experience with us, God within us. The daily practice of meditation is seen as re-enactment of this event with us. It dispels the anxiety of our ontic obscuration by rooting us in “Being” itself.  It disposes to receive the gift of true inner silence. We make a paradigm shift from relationship to union. This is the harbinger of a peace, rooted in non-violence because it is grounded in non-possessiveness. It is the silence that brings inner security and with it he dawn of the kingdom of peace and justice, truth and love.

-          Christopher Mendonca

“A Wonderful Silence Free of Burdens” in Times of India,

23^rd. December 2008

FAMILY FROM NO-GOOD NAZARETH

That Family from no-good Nazareth

Luke 2, 41…”The parents of Jesus went to Jerusalem for the feast, taking the Child Jesus with them. And the Child was missing.”

This incident allows us to understand that the Holy Family had to face pressures similar

to what families face today. The Holy Family of Nazareth was not a piece of poetry or a lovely painting. The first Christmas stable was crawling with dangerous vermin and choking with the reek of animal dung. No hot running water. Imagine the cold drafts cutting into the baby Jesus. Soon after his birth, the family was under sentence of death and had to flee as refugees.

It is a given fact today that family life is a most difficult project. Apart from economics and housing, one thinks immediately of divorce and broken homes, the scourge of alcohol and narcotics, the breakdown of discipline, and the rest of the unhappy lot.

Yet God comes within the chaos, within the discord, the failures, and he sits with us in all the lumpy, wrinkly, pimply, sweaty bodies that we feast and fight with.

To strive for a better world, for a better family where every child finds welcome and shelter  -  that is our gift to the world. Christian families should and can become shining beacons of real humanity, places where children are taught faith and values and receive real warmth and support. In a fast-food society dominated by the social control of TV, mobile phones and the internet (call it Facebook or Twitter), it is becoming increasingly difficult to bring parents and children together in a community of shared values and, to be practical, common meals. Through grace at table, other family prayers and prayers by the beside parents effectively pass on faith and values to their children. Little boys and girls are deeply touched when they notice how their parents have a relationship with Jesus, talk with him and do not merely go through a formal ritual. Children not only naturally believe what their parents and teachers tell them; they are born believers, and need little to grow into a life of faith if there is no gap between what they are told and what is lived. Children, until adults corrupt them, sense that men and women cannot be defined by what they have. Like everyone else, children and the young need to be and to grow as human beings.

 St. Luke makes a very insightful statement that Jesus grew to maturity and was filled with wisdom. As “true man” Jesus shares in the human process of “growing up” to maturity. He is not pre-programmed as the Son of God, nor a puppet dangling on the strings of the divine puppeteer. But like anyone of us he had to grow up into maturity and to seek wisdom. For this his mother and foster-father could not hold him back in their warm embrace, but had to give him the freedom to be himself and to become all that he was meant to be, even to break away from the family in order to be busy with his heavenly Father’s affairs.

For the family really to be a school of life, this hard lesson has to be taken aboard. It is understandable that Christian parents are afraid of the perils and temptations that surround their young. And in all honesty these perils are real enough. But holding their children back from the rough and tumble of life will reduce them to some infantile state, unable to face the competitive world. So there has to be a healthy tension of framework and flexibility. As we look to the Holy Family we have to learn from Mary and Joseph that love means so firm a trust in God and one another as to maintain the balance between discipline and freedom.

People, especially children, do not become good by being told to; they must be charmed into goodness, which, like love is not taught but caught. The environment in which we have been raised and in which we raise our children is essential to our formation and development. A family is a very human environment; in fact, the first a child is introduced to: the joy, the pain, the drama and the ordinary events of our lives are lived within its confines. God chose to mould and form his Son within the environment and culture of a family. He hasn’t broken the mould since, and thrown it away, because in his mind the family continues to be the place of holiness, love and emotional sustenance. 

The Holy Family of Nazareth tells us that in God the family is not extinct.

The obvious truth is that parents cannot but influence their children. It is preposterous and contrary to common sense to affirm that they cannot. It is from one’s parents that one learns the difference between right and wrong, why we should treat other people with respect and what life is or is not all about. I (Clifford Longley) acquired my taste for music from my father, my interest in social justice, my sense of duty, and my views on religion. It was only when I tested them in my heart and against experience, after leaving home, that I decided  “to choose for myself” and became a Catholic. I think that my father felt that he had failed, although I kept hold of the rest of the package as best I could.

But the idea that one could raise a child to be genuinely neutral on the question of religion, simply waiting to make up their own mind once they grow up, is palpably absurd. There is no such thing as value-free parenting.

Faith, as Pope Benedict has said, has to allow itself to be continuously interrogated by reason. Atheists’ minds are closed. It is as if they cannot bear the thought of their reason being interrogated by faith. As mine was, and faith broke through. Is this the possibility that really scares them?

TWENTY-SIXTH SUNDAY OF YEAR "C"

TWENTY SIXTH SUNDAY OF THE YEAR

Cycle “C”{Luke 16, 19 - 31}

“Rich man – Poor man”

LOOKING FOR A SUCCESSOR

                According to an Irish legend, there lived a king who had no sons. With a view to having a possible successor to the throne, he sent his couriers to invite eligible young men to show up for an interview with him. Prospective successors to the throne, however, should have these two qualifications: love of God and love of fellow human beings. There was a young man who honestly believed he filled the book, love of God and neighbour. His only problem, he felt, was that he was too poor and shabby to be presentable before the king. His only resort was to beg and borrow until he had enough money to buy suitable clothes and some provisions for the journey. Eventually he set out for the royal residence and after many days of hard walking was delighted to see the magnificent castle loom in the distance. But just short of entering, he was stopped by a beggar, of all people, sitting by the side of the road, ill-clad and trembling, and pleading for help with extended arms. “I’m cold and hungry. Help me, please.” Moved by the beggar’s plight, the young man stripped off his clothes and exchanged them for the rags of the poor man. Without a second thought, he also gave him his provisions. Then, rag tag and without any provisions for his return, and with some uncertainty, he entered the castle. The king’s attendant showed him in and, after a long wait, he was finally admitted to the throne room. The youth bowed low before the king. When he raised his eyes, he was struck with astonishment.  “You !  But you were the beggar by the roadside.”  “Yes,” replied the king. “I was that beggar.”  “But you are not a beggar; you are really the king !”  “Yes, I am really the king.”  “Why did you do this to me ?” the young man asked.  “Because.” said the king, “I had to find out if you do really love God and your fellow human beings. I knew that if  I came to you as king, in gold crown and royal robes, you would have been so impressed as to do anything I asked. But that way I would never have known what you really are at heart. So I came to you as a beggar, with no claims on you except for the love in your heart. And I have found out that you truly do love God and your fellow human beings. You will be my successor and have my kingdom.”

LOST CHANCES

            When the rich man of Jesus’ parable died, he saw Lazarus not sitting on a throne but reposing in Abraham’s bosom. He kicked himself for letting up a good chance of making friends of the poor hunched at the gates of plenty. There is another parable of the cunning steward who was resourceful and quick-witted. He won the gratitude of the poor by reducing their debts. So when he was dismissed from high office, he had many friends among the poor. But in the story of the rich man and Lazarus, the behaviour is the precise opposite of the wily steward’s. The rich man conspicuously does not win friends in low places. Rather, he behaves meanly with the beggar at the gate, even denying him the still edible floor-sweepings. The poor man simply didn’t exist for him. Somebody has said, “The way to know a man is to observe how he treats people he doesn’t need.” So when all wealth was lost in death and the fat cat banished to the torments below, the situation was decidedly reversed, with Lazarus rich forever and the other out of reach of a drop of water.

PERSONS vs. THINGS

                In the teaching of Jesus the old values come tumbling down. Possessions that used to be the sign of God’s predilection could well pave the path to perdition. Earthly wealth is ours for a very limited period.  As the Spanish proverb has it,  there are no pockets in a shroud !  We use what we have in order to make friends among the poor. They will welcome us home in heaven when it’s time to leave it all, and they will have God’s backing in the welcoming.

            Jesus seems to be telling us that we must love persons and use things; not the other way about: use persons and love things. Jesus seems to be saying: “Don’t ever give your heart away to a thing. If you do, that thing, whatever it may be, will gradually become your master; it will own you and lead you around on a leash of addiction, forcing you to compete with others to grab all you can, thereby producing the inversion of priorities. Choosing to run down this road is opting to cheat, bring down others, and cut corners on your integrity. “

MESSAGES FROM THE DEAD

            The Pharisees believed in life after death and here Jesus catapults their imaginations into it. He makes it real through narrating the cosmic conversation across the great divide, the last part of which concerns the five brothers of the rich man. “But if someone comes to them from the dead, they will repent.”  To give him his due, smarting from his own mistake, he thinks of warning his own brothers about the same by sending the ghost of Lazarus  -  the ghost of opportunities past  !  That would hopefully work up a religious appetite. take this charity stuff seriously and push trolleys of the finest fare to all the Lazaruses in their cardboard boxes. Father Abraham dismisses the proposition. “They have Moses and the prophets.”  They have heard the passionate denunciations of the uncaring rich by prophets like Amos. But will they listen even if somebody called Lazarus comes back from the dead ?  In the Gospel of John somebody called Lazarus does come back from the dead, an event that produced unbelief  and opposition in some, and faith in others (Jn. 12, 9 - 11).  And so the open-ended parable draws us in. We too have the law and the prophets. We also have these parables as part of our scriptures. And most of all, we have Someone greater than Lazarus who has come back from the dead !

NO CON, THIS

            “Opium of the people” was the phrase to describe religion as the massive scam. Promise the masses eternal happiness to come as the answer to the questions of poverty and exploitation. Not the religion of Jesus Christ, since it is anything but a cheap con. Rather, it is the costliest truth of all  -  that real fulfilment in life is rooted in love and service to all, rooted in the realities of pain and suffering as well as of human goodness and joy. Heaven is not the reward for being poor, nor hell the punishment for being rich. Heaven and hell are here already,  depending on using or losing opportunities to love.

                

CHRISTIAN MISSION

CHRISTIAN MISSION

                                                                                                            

“...but you will receive the power of the Holy Spirit which will come upon you, and then you will be my witnesses not only in Jerusalem but throughout Judaea and Samaria, and indeed to earth’s remotest end” (Acts 1, 18).

THE ORIGINAL MISSIONARY

            Mission begins with God, the God of divine exodus, who leaves his home and writes his mystery into the history of his people. He loves enough to extend himself in a total self-communication. “God is so incredibly in love with his creation that he personally invests himself in it” (Meister Eckhart). He could hardly wait for that day when man would suddenly awaken to the fact of God abroad as man, totally involved in a history and culture, member of a working class family, citizen of a nation oppressed; a God immersed in a world of births and deaths, with its experience of childhood, adolescence and adulthood, illness, insecurity and torture, of unemployment, work and leisure. And all with this purpose, that by the transfusion of the divine all ages and conditions of human living would be transformed, transfigured and elevated.

            In the Word made flesh, not only Spirit speaks to spirit, but Flesh speaks to flesh. Our flesh has ceased to be an obstacle; it has become a means and a mediation. It has ceased being a veil to become a perception. The Son of God did not come wearing his humanness like an overcoat, but rather brought the essence of being human to its capacity of revealing what God is like, The body of Christ is not clothed in idyllic silence, since the Incarnation means what it has always meant: something messy, noisy, smelly, bloody and painful. By becoming human, “God was writing his autobiography in the language of real flesh and blood” (Dorothy Sayers). In fact, he was in the person of Christ pulling and struggling with humanity in first-century Palestine and ever since, with his shoulder to the wheel of the human predicament, truly the Word made flesh, a force let loose in the world for man’s transformation. To believe this is good news, not only for modern man but for all humankind for all time.  A religion that constantly seeks the miraculous, the exotic, the other-worldly and  the defeat of nature, cannot help us to come to terms with our humanity, with the tasks of home and factory, of politics, school and church. Such a religion blinds us to the Risen One in the rising of the bread in the oven and the budding spring flower in the soil. Thus the full force of the tension between faith and hope are brought to bear on the world, thereby expressing itself, not by a flight from the world, but by a definite commitment to it. This is perfectly continuous with the Easter appearances of Jesus, which are quite clearly phenomena of mission. (“Go and tell.....”  “Go out into the whole world...”) Easter proclaims and promises the exodus from the world of sin and misery to one of “justice, peace, and the joy that is given by the Holy Spirit” (Rom 4, 17). It is the summons to transform the world, not fly or contemn it.

CHRIST CENTRED MISSIONARY

            All those who are centred on Jesus Christ must partake of his involvement or mission. And they will find God in the most unlikely places and human situations: in the hungry and naked, sick, criminal and oppressed.

            The secret of Jesus’ infallible insight and unshakeable conviction was his unfailing experience of solidarity with God, which revealed itself as an experience of solidarity with man and nature. This made him a uniquely liberated man, uniquely courageous, fearless, independent, truthful and hopeful. Why would anyone want to arrest, try and destroy him ? They found him too dynamic to be safe, too “missionary” to be pinned down ! He spoke about a power that they never understood: “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; then you are to be my witnesses.” He could say that precisely because he had received that power already and increases it continuously by sharing it generously with anyone who is willing to witness to him even to the shedding of his blood, as he did. Those who enter this power by baptism are willing to be equipped for the mission of Christ. They are also willing to reassess their methods in terms of the personal, social and political spheres of human living today. Seminars on evangelisation are continuous with the ongoing conversion demanded by God speaking through the prophets.

PEOPLE CENTRED MISSIONARY

            Groups of people vary in size, location, character and the extent to which they welcome the faith or oppose it. But what they all have in common is the presence of the missionary among them, with the why and what he is trying to do. We find ourselves serving people  whose backgrounds and concerns vary enormously, yet  wonder whether the needs of human beings, as distinct from their temporal preoccupation, ever really change. Surely today, as in the past, human beings are in search of the transcendent, want to be affirmed, need self-understanding, yearn to discover meaning in life, require healing and reconciliation. In the best of worlds, people hinder and hurt one another. So there is the presence of the evangeliser.

            Mission and witness derive from a life that takes baptism seriously. Baptism introduced us into the  life of faith that we treasure above all other goods. We love our faith and love our fellow humans. What better way of expressing our love for them than by giving them our most precious possession, the Christian faith ? It is love that makes for missionary zeal. Bereft of every other talent, this one talent  no one can claim he or she does not have. The missionary heart of Jesus was set on his Father and his kingdom. Being one of us, knowing our pains and joys, Jesus reveals our deepest possibilities. Christ did not exhaust the potentialities of human nature, taken discretely. This would have been impossible in one historical lifetime. For instance, he was not a great painter or philosopher or statesman or a great husband, though we must admit he was an excellent teacher, combining in that activity a great amount of true art and poetry. But the point is that Jesus concentrated in himself all the power and energy that human nature is capable of for activating any of the evocations that a man or woman may choose, and he concentrated it to a degree that no one could muster, a degree so high as to make it fit to be used by God. This power was the power of his self-giving love at the service of the Word. Thus, in preference to all other possibilities, Jesus chose the essential and most distinctively human potentiality of all, the one that has the most radical claim on all men and women: self-surrendering love. Jesus was a person who tested life and was tested by it, searching out life’s meaning by listening carefully to what makes life really valuable, and he lived and died trusting that life and death are not bad jokes.

            Our discipleship is not without moral, institutional and political problems. Since we are wounded by sin, our capacity for commitment is limited. Yet, the value of discipleship is that it inspires a vision and provides a context for analysis and choice. A missionary is nothing if he does not personify Christ. Only a missionary who copies Christ faithfully in himself can reproduce his image in others. An apostle’s life is a tale of friendship with the Lord in order to be capable of acquiescing in a “missionary tension” in the martyrial sense of the example of Therese of Lisieux and Francis Xavier. Without this contemplative and apostolic tension of intimate communion with Christ that leads to the foot of the Cross, a missionary cannot proclaim him in a credible way. Witnessing to Christ is not a piece of mimicry, but a challenge to live our human adventure as authentically as he did.

FAMILY FAITH MISSION

THE  FAMILY’S FAITH MISSION

            The Christian Family is understood as mission, continuous with the church, the body of the faithful who together are the effective sign of salvation turned towards the world. The family as “church in miniature” and as a vibrant cell in the whole body must interact with the other cells to bring about the healthy and missionary vitality of the whole. Weak cells produce an anaemic body. It is no wonder that Pope Benedict XV instituted the Feast of the Holy Family in 1920. Before that there was little need to put up the Holy Family as a model, since family life was by and large in a healthy condition. But then came the Industrial Age and the rise of the cities, fast lanes, mass media, entertainment outside the home. Serious problems began to appear on the family horizon. It is a given fact today that family life has become a most difficult project. Apart from economics, housing and education, one thinks immediately of divorce and broken homes, the scourge of alcohol and narcotics, the breakdown of discipline, the media’s indifference to marital fidelity, its trivialising of adultery and violence against women, and the rest of the unhappy lot.

            On the psycho-moral level the human values of the family must be restored, such values as trust, mutual respect and dialogue. But the really good news for marriage and the family will come from the teaching of Jesus Christ, mediated through the Church which continues the specific actions of Christ called the sacraments, and his teaching in homilies, catechetics, encyclicals and conciliar statements. The New Testament teachings about the family are not abstractions. They remain reassuringly down to earth: the mutual respect that members of a family owe to each other, issuing in empathy, compassion, considerateness, kindness, patience, gentleness, forbearance and forgiveness. What a home it would be were one to find there all the qualities just mentioned !  People would fight to come in and just hope that something of it would rub off on them and their families.

            Marriage as efficacious sign not only represents the salvific love action of Christ for his community, but actually effects it for the salvation of the world, actively re-enacting the paschal drama on the stage of life and thereby helping to re-establish the right relationship between God and man.  Marriage is a prognostic or eschatological sign, indeed, whereby husband and wife possess one another, but not exhaustively, since the person as such is destined for God who is even now taking possession of his creation. The characteristic surrender in marriage is an anticipation of the ultimate surrender to God. If love means working for the good of the other, conjugal love can have no greater intent than to hand the partner over to the ultimate consummation in God. This is coincident with the intent of pilgrimage, the essential dynamic of the Christian life.  Every family helps every other family on their way to the eternal family, viz., the most Holy Trinity, by prayer and the sharing of spiritual and material goods and cultural excellences.

            Togetherness and punctuality are key factors of home discipline and peace. Where are the children after 9.30 p.m. ?  Where are they at other times ?  Times for meals, for prayers and evening study ? Can the whole family sit together for the principal meals, and pray together for its own stability and happiness ? Or is the home a cheap hotel  where people come and go as they like without permission or information ?  Luke’s gospel tells us, “He went down with them and was subject to them.” How do sons and daughters take that line now-a-days ?  Have discipline and obedience become unmentionable words ?  Shall we insist that our children be educated into integral and competent human beings or turn out to be half-baked specimens of humanity, unable to face a competitive world ? Shall our children learn from us our prayers and refined vocabulary, or monosyllabic expletives and words of destructive criticism ?

            People, especially children, do not become good by being told to; they must be charmed  into goodness which, like love, is not taught but caught.  The environment in which we have been raised and in which we raise our children is essential to our formation and development.  A family is a very human environment, in fact, the first a child is introduced to.  The joy, the pain, the drama and the ordinary events of our lives are lived within its confines. God chose to mould and form his Son within the environment and culture of a family. He hasn’t broken the mould, since, and thrown it away, because in his mind the family continues to be the place of holiness, love and emotional sustenance.  And the Holy Family of Nazareth tells us that in God the family is not extinct.

            May God make the door every home a gateway to his eternal kingdom.

WHY STUDY THE OLD TESTAMENT

 "Why should we study the Old Testament?"

Answer: There are many reasons to study the Old Testament. For one, the Old Testament lays the foundation for the teachings and events found in the New Testament. The Bible is a progressive revelation. If you skip the first half of any good book and try to finish it, you will have a hard time understanding the characters, the plot, and the ending. In the same way, the New Testament is only completely understood when we see its foundation of the events, characters, laws, sacrificial system, covenants, and promises of the Old Testament. 

If we only had the New Testament, we would come to the Gospels and not know why the Jews were looking for a Messiah (a Savior King). We would not understand why this Messiah was coming (see Isaiah 53), and we would not have been able to identify Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah through the many detailed prophecies that were given concerning Him [e.g., His birth place (Micah 5:2), His manner of death (Psalm 22, especially verses 1, 7–8, 14–18; 69:21), His resurrection (Psalm 16:10), and many more details of His ministry (Isaiah 9:2; 52:3)].

A study of the Old Testament is also important for understanding the Jewish customs mentioned in passing in the New Testament. We would not understand the way the Pharisees had perverted God’s law by adding their own traditions to it, or why Jesus was so upset as He cleansed the temple courtyard, or where Jesus got the words He used in His many replies to adversaries. 

The Old Testament records numerous detailed prophecies that could only have come true if the Bible is God’s Word, not man’s (e.g., Daniel 7 and the following chapters). Daniel’s prophecies give specific details about the rise and fall of nations. These prophecies are so accurate, in fact, that skeptics choose to believe they were written after the fact.

We should study the Old Testament because of the countless lessons it contains for us. By observing the lives of the characters of the Old Testament, we find guidance for our own lives. We are exhorted to trust God no matter what (Daniel 3). We learn to stand firm in our convictions (Daniel 1) and to await the reward of faithfulness (Daniel 6). We learn it is best to confess sin early and sincerely instead of shifting blame (1 Samuel 15). We learn not to toy with sin, because it will find us out (Judges 13—16). We learn that our sin has consequences not only for ourselves but for our loved ones (Genesis 3) and, conversely, that our good behavior has rewards for us and those around us (Exodus 20:5–6).

A study of the Old Testament also helps us understand prophecy. The Old Testament contains many promises that God will yet fulfill for the Jewish nation. The Old Testament reveals such things as the length of the Tribulation, how Christ’s future 1,000-year reign fulfills His promises to the Jews, and how the conclusion of the Bible ties up the loose ends that were unraveled in the beginning of time.

In summary, the Old Testament allows us to learn how to love and serve God, and it reveals more about God’s character. It shows through repeatedly fulfilled prophecy why the Bible is unique among holy books—it alone is able to demonstrate that it is what it claims to be: the inspired Word of God. In short, if you have not yet ventured into the pages of the Old Testament, you are missing much that God has available for you.