The ‘new’ is already stirring, are we humble enough to perceive it inside and out?  First in our immediate landscape, meaning within ourselves and within our sisters.  Then the ‘new’ lingers well beyond us.  The nature of God is love, which includes change, transformative change, and these grounded in humility. 

On this Christmas eve morning I offer several texts that create a collage where the writers depict the mystery of the Christmas event, of God’s incarnate gift in Christ.  Along with Scripture, there is so much amazing art depicting the event for us, and then writers who have experienced and from their faith share through poetry and prose their experience of the Divine birth of God. I begin with these words of Sr. Maria Boulding: “Faith means life in the presence of God who is coming.  Joyful already, it is a prelude to joy” (The Coming of God, p.171).  Is our faith right now elusive or is it alive in anticipation of the ‘One who is to come’.  Here we are on the cusp of something ‘new’, the new of God, which longs to break into our lives…Advent has been preparing us, helping us to lean into the Christmas event which is given ‘for us and to us’.  It means change…but the change comes with grace…it comes with a new sense of Christ in our lives.

“If you wish to meet God, go as far as your own heart”.  Dear Sisters, these words of St. Bernard were appropriate at the beginning of Advent, and they are as appropriate right now.  Our gospel reading for this fourth Sunday of Advent is the Visitation.  The encounter of Mary and Elizabeth is an encounter of the heart, heart meeting heart…Without the opening of the heart there would be no realization or awareness of the new birth stirring in the cave of the heart.  We hear Elizabeth in the gospel crying out: “As soon as your greeting came the babe in my womb leaped for joy” (Lk 1:44).

And now listen to similar words from the epistle: “Rejoice in the Lord always” (Phil 4:4-7).  “Have no anxiety at all…”  “In everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, make your requests known to God.”  Sisters, note: we are to bring EVERYTHING to God.  We hear in other scripture texts, especially the psalms, that God knows the intention of our heart even before we express it…

There is a ‘voice’…do you hear it?  A voice that is crying out in the center of our longing.  What is that voice saying that cries out, that yearns for our attention, that yearns for us to open our hearts even more now as we await the manifestation of God’s ‘new gesture of love’.  Is this something that you need…that I need?  Absolutely.