Unearned Luck

Having eyes, do you not see, and having ears, do you not hear? And do you not remember?    -St. Mark 8:18 The Midnight Mass is the most beautiful liturgy of the year for me. For the most part, the people attending Midnight Mass have made the choice to be there, possess the willingness to participate, and bring with them an eager anticipation upon which comes a peace, a joy, and an energy rarely, if ever, seen at that dark, lonely ushering of the Eve to the Day. At the Midnight Mass, we are there with the shepherds in the fields and join them as the first witnesses of the miracle of the Incarnation, walking into that cave and falling to our knees in silent, fearful adoration. We see St. Joseph, the Blessed Mother, and the Christ Child and are quickly overcome with a joy and a peace we have never known before, but unlike the shepherds on that first Christmas, we know the reason for our joy and peace. We know that the Word of God has become Man, so that through His pass...

  "And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Also another book was opened, which is the book of life. And the dead were judged by what was written in the books, by what they had done" (Revelation 20:12). The Church is squarely into the first week of Advent. Advent and Lent are the two seasons of penance in each liturgical year, both of which provide useful opportunities to ponder the four last things: death, judgement, Heaven, Hell. Since Lent precedes the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Our Lord, Lent seems to lend itself to meditating upon the eventuality of our own deaths, that certainty we cannot escape; upon the indescribable joy of Heaven, to which we've been made co-heirs and to which Christ precedes us; and the reality of Hell, from which Christ's humiliation and death has freed us. Advent, though, as it leads us into the celebration of Christmas, seems to be a time to mediate almost exclusively upon...

"And a great portent appeared in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars; she was with child and she cried out in her pangs of birth, in anguish for delivery. And another portent appeared in heaven; behold a great red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns, and seven diadems upon his heads. His tail swept down a third of the stars of heaven, and cast them to the earth. And the dragon stood before the woman who was about to bear a child, that he might devour her child when she brought it forth; she brought forth a male child, one who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron, but her child was caught up to God and to his throne, and the woman fled into the wilderness, where she has a place prepared by God, in which to be nourished for one thousand two hundred and sixty days." -Revelation 12: 1-6 In the 169 words of this RSV-CE translation of the vision St. John received from Christ, the Evangelist p...