Our Sunday Visitor

We perhaps experience this most during Advent, the world’s busiest commercial season, when it is easy to become lost in a plethora of Christmas music, preparations and festive engagements. In the midst of this activity, the Church calls us to a watchful silence. Here are three suggestions for how to find rest and encounter God in this season of preparation. Authentic silence requires that we limit exterior noise and build time for stillness into our day.

If we shift from thinking strictly about food and consider the more lasting things that nourish or even complete us, we confront a scary possibility: If we were invited to feast everlastingly on those things that are most noble, beautiful, dignifying and truly fit for human beings, we might turn them down if we hadn’t developed an appetite for such things.

In the Arthurian courtly romances of the 12th-century French poet Chrétien de Troyes, every tale of a spectacular knightly quest opens with a liturgical holiday, celebrated joyfully in community. In attendance on each occasion is the entire court — especially the knights of the Round Table. Normally scattered on their various quests, at these celebrations they are all together. Everyone eats too much, delays at the table, and is reluctant to part from each other’s company once the party is over.

But the relics of this past still remain. When driving along the city’s expressways, you can’t miss the monumental churches that rise from the city blocks — testaments to the faith of those early communities and one reason that Chicago, despite its political drama and violence, earned the nickname “The Heavenly City.” For me, it was the dome of the Byzantine-Romanesque church of Our Lady of Perpetual Help that always stirred a sense of awe.

The painting, Wilde’s poem suggests, is almost underwhelming. Of course, Wilde knew the scriptural story. He would have read Luke’s startling yet quiet account of the conversation between the angel and the girl that would change the world forever. Yet, as a dramatist, Wilde also knew how God could have had it play out.

St. Frances Xavier Cabrini, known in her day as Mother Cabrini, devoted her life to helping immigrants find a place to call home on earth. In her way of living, she consequently guided the souls she encountered toward heaven. Cultivating a generous heart The United States wasn’t home to this Italian woman. In fact, she’d asked Pope Leo XII for permission to travel to the American west, rather than the east coast, as a missionary. But the need was in New York, and so to New York she went.

Rather, the fruits of such knowledge should be the virtues. “Those who realize they are living as strangers in this world,” St. Augustine said, “who know they have an eternal home country in heaven…they know how to live here patiently” (Sermon 359A, 2). St. Augustine here was preaching on the last line from this Sunday’s gospel: “By your perseverance you will secure your lives” (Lk 21:19). The Greek word hypomone can just as easily be translated as patience.

St. Martin was gifted with aerial flight, bilocation, instant cures, miraculous knowledge and a deep connection with animals. As amazing as these gifts are, what deeply moved those who knew him was his willingness to tend to those in need no matter their ancestry, how much money they had or how sick they were. He didn’t see others through the lens of this world, filtering some out for position and others for the color of their skin.

But this Sunday is about more than an important piece of Roman real estate. This Sunday actually goes to the heart of our identity as Catholics, as believers, as Christians on a pilgrim journey of faith. If you’ve ever attended the dedication (or rededication) of a church, it’s a profoundly moving experience. In so many ways, it echoes the sacrament of baptism. The church is sprinkled with water; the altar is anointed with oil; the walls are blessed.

Christ shows us that his humanity is not a mere likeness but something entirely real. Jesus’ tears show the depth of his love for his friend. He wept not out of despair but out of love and in solidarity with our human condition.