With Christmastide ending, we find ourselves observing the official feast of Epiphany. What significance does this feast hold for us? To further explore, we return to a Noontime reflection on the wisdom of the Magi. We reflect on the wisdom they reveal, the wisdom of patience, willingness, and openness as they listen to God’s voice that speaks within.
I love this portion of the Christmas story. The wise men are sowise that they are able to read Herod’s secret intent. Nothing can be hidden from the wise because they are so connected to the creator that they seem to have special insight. What they really have is patience, serenity, and a finely tuned ear for God’s word. And so the wise men left for their own country by another road.
I am thinking about the number of times I have averted disaster because that calm, strong voice within indicated that I was to stay put. We notice that an attitude of patience and a willingness to obey always accompany the wise. They do not appear to be brash or excitable. They do not speak harshly, nor are they silenced. Like the Persistent Widow, they know when to persevere in speaking God’s word. And like the Three Magi, they know when to stand down and melt away into God’s protecting presence.
The wise know when to stand and witness – and when to leave quietly by another road.
On the tenth day of Christmas, my true love gives to me ten lords a-leaping.
Many of us are familiar with The Ten Commandments that Yahweh gives to Moses, but how often do we pause to think of the fact the God, through Moses, not only gives us a simple set of rules to follow, but that he explains the effect these rules will have on our lives. God sees our authenticity by the way we live, and by the way we do or do not say, “Yes,” in response to God’s call. Today the old Christmas carol poses these questions to us: do we see the Gospel stories as a fulfillment of God’s hope in the covenant God establishes with us in the promise of the Ten Commandments?
This part of the Exodus story is bracketed by two convergent episodes: the provision of quail, manna and water by God to the Israelites, and the planning and building of a desert temple-tent for Yahweh by the Israelites. We see actions by both God and the Chosen People that speak of their desire to live in a covenant relationship. And the actual agreement, along with its explanations and implications, lies between these two actions in chapters 20 to 24.
The Holy Spirit
God takes the Israelites out of bondage – just as Jesus later does for all when he comes to live among us and to institute the Kingdom (in Luke 4:14-30). With the giving of the commandments, God foresees the struggle of the people in the desert. God’s preservation and protection of these people bring to God not only fame, glory and praise, but also an arrogant, contemptuous rejection by us. So too does Jesus arrive among God’s people to fulfill the Mosaic Law, to provide and protect us, and then to suffer at our hands; yet ultimately, God the Father and God the Son both offer their compassion and mercy to us when we are wayward. All that is required of us is that we repent of our past transgressions and then respond to the call. Just as God sent an angel to guard the Israelites and bring them to the place God had in mind for them (23: 20-33), so too does Jesus send the Holy Spirit to dwell with us after Jesus’ resurrection – to guide and protect, and to lead us to the holy place he has prepared for us. Of course, later in Chapter 32 of Exodus, the people tire of waiting for Moses to descend Mt. Sinai, so they create and worship the Golden Calf. Moses returns, breaks the tablets and loses his patience. The people repent, agree to do as Yahweh asks and Yahweh restores the tablets. A familiar story that we repeat today – we only need to read and compare history and current events. And it is no wonder that we stray – no wonder that the Israelites strayed. When we look at chapters 20 to 24 of Exodus, we see the social implications of the Mosaic Law. We might pay special attention to some of the verses that hold ideas difficult to take, verses that call for us to respect ourselves and one another: 22:15, 23:1, 22: 1-3, 22: 20, 21:35-36.
So on this day when we continue our celebration of God’s truest gift of love, we take a few moments to recollect our experiences in covenant relationships with others. We might mediate for a bit on how we might remain faithful to the one central covenant in our lives. And we might decide how best to renew that covenant each day with our Creator.
Adapted from a reflection on The Ten Commandments written February 14, 2007.
Being a teacher, Jesus asks his listeners a question to see if they have fully understood the enormity of his message; and when it is clear they have not, he calls forth the very principal on which they stand to show them where they err. He truly is a master. He uses what we say and do to mirror back to us the echo of what we declare.
From today’s MAGNIFICAT: From the beginning of time, God has acted to reverse the loneliness which represents the consummate curse to the human race – an experience analogous to hell. Even this master defers to his creator, God, in all the important decisions of his life. He responds to the call of love which washes away the fears of loneliness, anxiety, betrayal, failure and abandonment. This master obeys the voice within that calls him to act in and for love. If Christ does this, if this is what it means to be Messiah, then how can we believe that we know a better way to exist? How do we dare to defy God?
From today’s MAGNIFICAT reflection by Mother Elvira Petrozzi: If you are able to be an instrumentin the hands of God, if you have trust, love, and the patience to accept His plans for you, He restores to you what you have given, one hundred times over . . . Those who trust in him will not remain imprisoned in their little plans. I have seen young people who built a cage with their own hands and then fell into desperation because of it.
Christ built no cages; he opened doors and windows. Christ did not succumb to the siren song of Satan to be like gods.Christ obeyed the voice of his vocation.
I am reminded of a favorite verse from Jeremiah: For I know well the plans I have in mind for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare, not for your woe! (29:11)
This is what it means to be Messiah. Obeying God for love of God rather than out of fear or laziness. Loving God for the passion we feel for God rather than from a sense of duty or response to a whim. Committing ourselves to the Messiah even as the Messiah commits himself to God, this is what we believe. This is what we follow. Enormous plans for our joy, rather than little plans for woe. Awesome plans for a serenity that comes from doing what is good and right and beautiful even though there may be pain in the interim. For . . .
It is in the doing that we redeem and are redeemed.
It is in the acting that we declare and are declared.
It is in the obeying that we love and are loved.
This we know. This we believe.
Let us rise up and follow the Messiah born to us this night.
Cameron, Peter John. “Meditation of the Day.” MAGNIFICAT. 12.2 (2009). Print.
Adapted from a Favorite written on February 12, 2009, posted on Christmas Day 2017.
God hears the pleas of two desperate people in two distant places, and he sends his special messenger Raphael to guide Tobiah in the healing of Sarah and Tobit. Tobiah is first the faithful son and later the courageous and abiding spouse. Sarah sees no reason for her existence based on a series of marriages that fail because a demon has become enamored of her. She becomes separate from everyone in her intense and desperate grief. Tobit, a good main who is faithful to his Jewish beliefs, has also become separate his blindness. Yearning for the light, he seeks death rather than continue in the darkness. He, like Sarah, feels alone; they both search for the reason that God has visited punishment upon them when they know themselves to be innocent of doing wrong. They stand judged by others because Old Testament thinking saw misfortune as a punishment for sin. Some of us may from time to time feel like this man and woman.
Yesterday in chapter three, we read that Tobit and Sarah’s desperation has reached such depths that each, in distant privacy, prays for release from this world. As they pray for death, their prayers rise to God intertwining like spirals of incense. God hears these petitions and sends Raphael to accompany the faithful Tobiah in his journey to knit together these wounded souls. God intervenes when we sometimes least expect it . . . and in very surprising and confounding ways.
Rembrandt: The Angel Rafael Leaving Tobit and his Family
The journey that Tobiah takes is a long and complicated one. Yet he accepts his father’s request, finds a traveling companion (Raphael in disguise) and perseveres faithfully without fully understanding how his actions will result in anything good. He continues, he obeys, he listens for and answers the call. This is how we must live. It is how we must act. This is how we find consolation and healing. It is how we encounter God. This is how we become wounded healers. This is God’s plan.
So after reflection with the story of Tobit, we pray.
Sometimes we must reach the point of desperation in order to know what we truly hold sacred . . . and that we are sacred healers.
Sometimes we must fall into the abyss in order to find God’s abiding presence . . . and our own divinity.
Sometimes we must cry out from our aloneness in order to understand that true and deep hope is also bold and outrageous . . . and that God’s best hope lies in us.
Sometimes we must be victim to our darkest fears in order to lay aside our anxieties . . . for then we see them as prison bars that separate us from God.
Sometimes we must be blind in order to see.
Sometimes we must feel unloved in order to be loved and to love truly and deeply.
Sometimes we must reach the point of desperation in order to know what we truly hold sacred. And in that spot, in that distant place that is actually dep within, we will find our consolation, our birth in Christ. Amen.
We have sought consolation from paralysis, blindness and deafness. We have looked for peace when we are speechless or plagued by possession. Today we reflect on how we might seek comfort in the face of death or deep loss.
We know the stories of those Jesus raised from the dead while he walked among us as human: his friend Lazarus, the widow of Nain’s son, the synagogue leader Jairus’ daughter. We also know the story of how, through the intercession of the risen Christ, Peter brought Tabitha/Dorcas back from death, and Paul called back Eutychus. When we look at the Old Testament, we remember that Elijah restored life to the widow of Zarephath’s son, and Elisha to the Shunammite woman’s son. And perhaps most importantly, we know that Christ has the power to return each of us to eternal life once we leave this earthly one.
Henry Thomson: The Raising of Jairus’ Daughter
All of this reflection on restoration speaks to our desire to overcome death. It exemplifies our hope that deep loss is not permanent. And it resonates with our expectation that Christ’s love for each of us calls all of us to union with him . . . out of certain death and into certain life. In this holiest of seasons when we celebrate the coming of Jesus to the world, we return to one more story of restoration. The story of Tobit and Sarah.
I have always turned to this Book when I am in the middle of a hopeless situation, when the circumstances in which I find myself offer absolutely no anticipation of salvation for myself or for someone I hold dear. Each time I spend time with these verses, I come away refreshed by the themes the story offers: healing, restoration, desperate prayers made, and desperate prayers answered. There are soap-opera elements, cliff-hanging events. There are people focused on money, power and sex; yet, over all of these forces, love holds sway. And it is the only place in the Bible where Raphael is featured. He is, indeed, so important that the story cannot take place without him.
James Tissot: The Raising of the Son of the Widow of Nain
So why does this archangel visit these characters disguised as a traveler? How does he bring them hope, rebirth and transformation? What is the attitude of each character before God the Creator? And what might we take away from the lessons laid out here?
If we have time to read the whole of Tobit today, let us do so. If not, let us focus on Chapter 3. Tomorrow a Prayer for Death . . . and Birth.
Adapted from a reflection written during Advent 2007.
Be comforted, be comforted, my people, saith your God. Speak ye to the heart of Jerusalem, and call to her, for her evil is come to an end, her iniquity is forgiven; she hath received of the hand of the Lord double for all her sins. The voice of one crying in the desert: Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the wilderness the paths of our God. Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low and the crooked shall become straight, and the rough ways plain. And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh together shall see that the mouth of the Lord hath spoken . . . Behold the Lord God shall come with strength, and his arm shall rule. Behold his reward is with him and his work is before him. He shall feed his flock like a shepherd: he shall gather the lambs with his arm, and shall take them up on his bosom, and he himself shall carry them that are young . . .
From time to time we reflect on the ideas of exile and doom . . . today’s dawn brings consolation.
Who hath measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, and weighed the heavens in his palm? Who has poised with three fingers the bulk of the earth, and weighed the mountains in scales, and the hills in a balance?
After the darkness . . . comes the light . . . more revealing and more wonderful than we have ever imagined.
Do you not know? Hath it not been heard? Hath it not been told you from the beginning? Have you not understood the foundations of the earth? . . . And to whom have ye likened me, or made me equal? saith the Holy One. Lift up your eyes on high, and see the one who has created these things . . . not one of them was missing.
The holy ones who wait and watch and witness . . . will receive their comfort . . . a consolation more intense and enduring than they have ever dreamed.
Youths shall faint and labor, and young men shall fall by infirmity. But they that hope in the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall take wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint.
Last Christmas Day we read and reflected upon the beginning of Romans 11 in which St. Paul brings to us, God’s Remnant, the message of our creator’s Providenceand Fidelity. He reminds us that God understands the human condition and that he sends us his grace to overcome our fears and the darkness. God also understands rupture and the deepest places of the heart that suffer from the pain of disconnection and separation . . . and God wants to heal this . . . to call us back . . . to gather us in his arms. God wants to give us his Consolation.God is the Forgiving Father of the Prodigal Son story. We may be either the Straying Child who has spent his gifts carelessly, or the Remaining Child who is jealous and bitter at the Father’s generosity toward those who return. Or perhaps we have found a place where we can numb ourselves . . . remain aloof . . . protect ourselves from the suffering and undergoing of life that we are meant to experience. Or maybe we are Children of the Light . . . who struggle with self . . . who rise to the undergoing . . . who falter and stumble but who turn to God always as the first and last source and sustenance. Most likely we are all of these . . . and we do well when we reflect that our true Consolation rests in openness to reconciliation with God and with others. We do well to rely on God’s Providence and Fidelity and meditate on this idea, as we do on Christmas Day each year, that we are to be God to one another.
So on this Sunday of joy amidst darkness and waiting we, like God, are to abide with those who have broken faith with us. We are to remain faithful, remain present but without participating in any dysfunction. We are to be hopeful, to be open to the potential of something greater which God sends through his grace rather than our works. We are to abide withoutfear, because God is with us, especially in our moments of deepest terror. And we are to remain merciful, imitating Christ, because God always comes to his remnant, to those who wait, and hope and seek.
I do not know why I worry that perhaps God has no provisions to fix things that go wrong. God sends us the message constantly that God is capable of handling all things. Jesus feeds thousands from a small meal. Why do I worry?
God multiplies God’s self in us each day. Luke records (1:46-55) how Mary intoned her beautiful Magnificat when she heard Gabriel’s words . . . My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord . . . I must remember that my being must magnify the plans and works of God and not diminish them . . . just as Jesus multiplies food to sustain those who follow him.
The intercessions and Morning Prayer from today’s MAGNIFICAT align with these thoughts.
You are our life and our salvation!
Yours is the night and yours the day: enlighten us with your wisdom at every hour of our lives. You are our life and our salvation!
Yours are the years and yours the season: teach us to trust in your provident designs. You are our life and our salvation!
Yours is the fullness of life: bring us to dwell in your presence for ever. You are our life and our salvation!
Lord, God of timelessness, you order all things according to your wise designs. Grant us discerning hearts, that we may know and love and serve your plan, through Christ our Lord. Amen.
Cameron, Peter John. “Prayer for the Morning.” MAGNIFICAT. 2.3 (2011): 30. Print.
I have a friend who – whenever life gets a bit sticky for her or her children – is suddenly presented with hearts. Heart-shaped leaves, heart-shaped clouds, even heart-shaped patterns of toothpaste left in the bathroom sink. Today she told me that she was thinking: Who keeps leaving these for me? She believes that she has the answer, someone she knows through family photographs and family stories, someone whom she has not met in this life but who knows her in any case. She believes that it is her grandmother. So do I. Love knows no bounds.
In today’s Noontime we read about the love that God has for us, for his creation. This love is so great that land creatures survive in the sea; sea creatures walk on land. Fire in water maintains its strength; yet flames do not consume flesh. With these powerful images, we understand how strong God is; we understand how much God loves us.
The Meditation in MAGNIFICAT today is from Father John Tauler, a Dominican priest, a popular preacher and mystical theologian who died in 1361. This is what he has to say about God’s love.
Especially cherish firm trust in God’s love: if that weakens, your longing for God sinks away, and the hidden love is soon quenched within you . . . If one now questions whether or not he has true love, let him search deep in his soul and ever deeper, and light will be granted to him to know how he stands towards this degree of love. All the harm that can befall you is in this: you cannot fathom your inmost soul, or perhaps you will not. Once you enter there, God’s grace awaits you, admonishing you incessantly to keep up a courageous spirit about your standing with him. But many a one resists his inner voice and keeps on going so until he at last becomes unworthy of it and it ceases to be heard, and that forever. The cause of this misfortune is nothing else than self-trust. But if only one be humbly submissive to the divine guidance, it will finally lead him into such a divine union, that he shall enjoy in this life something of the bliss proper only to life eternal. May God grant that this shall happen to us all.
Our self-trust, rather than trust in God, is what often prohibits us from seeing the glory that is God each day. Miracles happen around us and to us constantly, yet we worry so, and fly through life at such a rapid pace that we may miss these glorious hearts being left for us along the way. We miss the times when breaches are bridged, when wounds are healed, when the dead rise . . . and so we do not praise God because we walk past the many ways in which he loves us each morning, each noon, each night.
For myself, I will make a special resolution to be on the look-out for the heart-shaped messages God is sending to me. And then I will pause to praise God. I will begin to cherish a firm trust in God’s love for me, I will search my soul even deeper, I will look for the ways in which I have been magnified and glorified by God . . . and I will look more carefully for that divine union in this life.
Cameron, Peter John. “Meditation of the Day.” MAGNIFICAT. 20.1 (2010). Print.
We often take a look at how the exiled people prepared to return to Jerusalem; we also reflect on how the people who journeyed home depending on God to protect them rather than troops and arms. Today we a look at the same story a little further along, and from a different perspective – that of the builder/administrator Nehemiah.
This rebuilding of all that has been lost is not an easy task; it is a long and arduous process and nothing ever feels complete. Indeed, the writer records that the enemies of Israel, once they hear that the walls and gates of that great city have been rebuilt, plot to bring the nation down again; yet even so, the people are exhorted to confide in God alone. We hear in Nehemiah’s own words (6:15) that our enemies lost much face in the eyes of the nations, for they knew that it was with God’s help that this work [of rebuilding] had been completed. Reading further, we see how plots and their schemers roil around these people who huddle in the ruined glory of their ancestors as they try to rebuild. The remnant nation is shielded from her enemies as restoration – through God – transforms rubble to beauty.
Once the outer structure is established, Nehemiah begins to re-organize within and he re-arranges the people to protect the little gain they have purchased. Being wise and following the call of Yahweh, Nehemiah knows that greed will spark jealousy in their enemies and so he takes a census to count the flock, to present them as delivered by their God.
We have visited with Ezra and Nehemiah before in the Noontimes, and we have watched this pair of men – the priest and the administrator – work in concord to save a humbled nation from harm as she returns home. We might marvel at the trust they place in God as they take on the responsibility of shepherding these faithful in their process of restoration.
When we allow God to assist us in our recovery from calamity . . . and when we have rebuilt the doors and gates of our precinct . . . when we have set up gatekeepers and appoint night watchmen to guard against further damage by old and wily foes . . . we must rely on God to put into our hands all the tools that we will continue to need as we once again flourish in the sun. For if we have trusted God with the great misfortunes on our lives, so must we trust him with the many small mishaps of the day. This God who loves us is capable of great and small deeds. When we find ourselves at stopping points in our process of rebirth, we will also need encouragement to continue to progress to full and joyful renewal and rejuvenation. When we place our trust in God, when we turn the long and difficult process over to the one who creates all good . . . then we too will want to take our census and to count ourselves as present and as saved by our God.
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The Noontimes 
