"The Hopes & Fears of All the Years"

We have journeyed nearly forty days and forty nights. We have traveled as by night, sometimes over rocky ground, knowing not which way to turn, whether right or left. At moments fear of desolation has crept in. Yes, we have stood on mountain tops seeing through miles of clear air. Yet so often we have been surrounded by darkness, our culture so bent on self-destruction and death.

But peace! Do you see the star hovering over a field of shepherds? Do you hear the soul-livening strains of angels? The hopes and dreams of the world lie just ahead. "He appeared and the soul felt its worth." All of our roads and the roads of everyone everywhere lead to this Most Holy Place. I have knelt in this cave as Sr. Mary Anne has. I have pressed my lips to the ground on this spot where His manger lay. And I shall never be the same again .... but from this place always higher and lighter, ascending with the strain of angels' voices.

Do you hear? Do you see? Before us lies the Desire of the Everlasting Hills, the perfection promised by Eden: God dwelling in Man and Man dwelling in God. This is the purpose of all human history, the meaning of each life, and the highest promise of every age and era.

No more can dark thoughts haunt us. No more can death pretend to a meaning and power it does not possess. For the Lord of Life is born in our midst. And we are to be His brothers, His sisters (Mt 12:49), His friends (Jn 15:15).

Our Gospel lesson this morning reads like a census document: Shealtiel, Zerubbabel, Abiud, Eliakim, Azor ...., not towering Patriarchs, but real flesh-and-blood people who lived their lives, married and had children, and participated (as it would turn out) in something far greater than they could have imagined .... as we do in our own lives.

From Sunday to Sunday during our Nativity pilgrimage, we have thought long thoughts. We have entertained the Holy Ones of history in the tents of our hearts. But now today, on the Sunday preceding the Nativity, we have arrived to ordinary people .... to ourselves.

Theologians, and commentators will say that this special Sunday emphasizes Jesus' human nature, that He descended from ordinary, fallible people. They will use phrases like, "Not Mount Sinai, but the tents of the Israelites." "Not Athens (the seat of philosophy), but Berlin (the center of historical studies)." "Not Alexandria with its soaring rhetoric, but Antioch." "Not lofty ideas, but

For the busy shop of the human heart (which sadly can also become fascinated with filth) is the birthplace which God has planned for His Son. As mysterious Magi from the East signify the universal call of God to every human creature, so we are called to unfold the fair linen of our purified hearts down upon the earth to receive His Divine Birth. This is our gold. This is our frankincense — to receive the Birth of all births in our hearts. "Let every heart prepare Him room!" the old Christmas carol declares. The "herald angels" go forth, royal heralds, and we His subjects are to receive His Divine visitation, the visitation of the King.

How shall we respond? What shall we do? What shall we say? It will mean, certainly, a going out from ourselves. We must leave the comfortable silence of our self-assuring thoughts and untested, unchallenged ideas. We must draw a line on the earth, drive a stake into the ground, not hidden within ourselves, but out in full view of all.

Two or three generations ago, this would have been a non-event. For our sphere of life was inescapably a going out — what we did every day, what we said. People of our generation will say, "What did we do before we had video games and televisions and computers? We went out to play. We had breakfast on a Saturday morning and went out. We encountered other young people who also went out. We did. We said. We would play. And what was play? 'What do you want to do?' 'I don't know, what do you want to do?' So we would dream things up. It was always a going out from outselves into the place where others also were going out.

Yet, during recent decades, this going out and doing is no longer been the rule. The rule is a staying in .... perhaps surrounded by hovering, protective parents, safe in our room and always on the tether to one's smart phone.

Several years ago a young woman graduating from an elite college informed me of something I did not know: "Old man, you and your friends struck out. You did things. My friends believe that if they have an opinion, then that is what they have done and who they are."

"What an odd thing!" I thought to myself. It stuck out in my mind. But as the years have passed, I have come to understand this better.

Just last year, a young man working at the farm told me that his favorite film was Sean Penn's Into the Wild (2007). It is the story of a college-aged man who has become obsessed with the idea of "becoming one with nature." He condemns the man-made world. He complains of its many evils. He boycotts family events as being "false." The only truth, he believes, is to "live within nature." So he strike out for the Alaskan wilderness, donating his life savings of $24,000 to charity, undoubtedly to causes like the Sierra Club. He believes he is going out from himself, but he does not. Instead, goes further and further into his own head. He does not make plans. He does not pack clothes for the weather. He does not bring food. Instead, he journeys into his own mind believing that he is somehow stepping into the benign round of nature's harmony .... quietly, gently so as not to intrude on its perfection. And yet he succeeds only in projecting his fantasies onto the objective cruelty of the food chain. From this point the film documents the slow process of his death.

After watching this film, I also believed this to be a remarkable cultural document. It is a story for our time — the story of people who live only in their heads. As the young woman and the young man informed me, there are many, many people now who live only in their heads. They latch on to ideas that please them. They avoid all points of view that disagree. They read and watch only content that confirms their emotional convictions. And they label all critiques of their "philosophy" as being "fake" or "deceitful." They do not engage but rather demonize their perceived critics.

The Worldwide Web stokes this overheating process with a vengeance. For Google and Facebook and Instagram and advertisers of every stripe flood the space around us with whatever our interests appear to be. That is, the meaning of the world we see around us keeps leading us back to our own daydreams and vanities. We are confirmed in our own convictions. We see that we must be "right," for we have entered a space that bends back on itself, admitting of no contradictions to our self-enclosed "safety."

Of course, there is no safety here, but rather danger. For this age of people-in-their-bubbles preoccupied with fantasy — whether virtual reality, films, or pornography — rejects the safeguards sought by past generations. And chief among these safeguards is critical thinking, which is the seeking-out of perspectives which disagree with your own, understanding that this will save us.

Critical thinking had been the "main spring" in all fields of inquiry: not Blogs, but peer-reviewed journals and published books; not conspiracy theories, but rigorous and transparent studies; not personal "theories," but consensus built on fact. In the service of all of these, we have always ensured that dissenting opinions are heard.

This was the idea and goal for a liberal arts education: to expose students to many different and opposing points of view. The finished product would be a mind superbly well-prepared to practice the crucial, daily art of thinking. Its necessary adjunct is free speech — ensuring that every point of view might be heard in a fair and open setting. Equal time must be given to all major positions. The alternative is a whole society who "lives in its head" with few objective correlatives to correct and guide it.

Sadly, many universities and colleges have strayed from this goal. Their faculties have become "one-party systems" — rarely (if ever) tenuring professors who oppose the "party line." Indeed, dissenting guest speakers at these schools are hooted off stage.

Have you ever heard of the Taizé community? They are a monastic community of Christians in France known for their beautiful sacred music and liturgies. I was present at the Harvard Divinity School when Taizé monks came to make a presentation of their life and work. They were hooted down. They endured insults. The people who ran the event were anxious for their physical safety and called the police. People threw things at them and yelled, "Get those hateful images out of here!" .... referring to the crosses that appeared on the cover of their worship materials. The Dean of Students was summoned, and the event was shut down.

We regularly read in the newspapers of protests, sit-ins, protesting professors or their courses, which did not conform to the party line. What sort of graduates do these institutions produce?

We who were trained under the old regime are filled with revulsion. We recall the dread-filled scene in Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol in which the Ghost of Christmas Present draws back his great robe to reveal two cowering children in rags. "The girl is want," he says. "The boy is ignorance. Fear the boy!"

Ignorance is not expressed as no knowledge, for that would signify an openness to becoming knowledgeable. Ignorance is expressed by parroting pre-packaged conclusions decided in advance and then memorizing factoids that are ordered to these tendentious conclusions. Because they lack content, such opinions are often voiced, not in a reasoned way, but in shrill and vociferous tones. For genuine knowledge, to adapt St. Paul's words, is not a "sounding brass or a clanging cymbal." It

By their nature, teachers of genuine knowledge are patient and understanding, for truth and time are on their side.

Yes, we "fear the boy." For graduating young people from "academies of one idea" eventually will coarsen and degrade all of our lives. All gentleness is lost. A well-educated person is respectful of all points of view. An educated person is able to function as a spirited and competent debater on any side of an issue. Such a person was once was known as a "gentleman" or a "lady" — people who comport themselves in an atmosphere of mutual respect.

Genuine knowledge is never to be feared, much less demonized. As one who has spent much of his life doing advanced work in both humanities and sciences, I have discovered that everything I have learned has stretched me better to apprehend the abundance of God, Whom we know to be "the Way, the Truth, and the Life" (Jn 14:6). And I adjure everyone I meet not to fall for the lie that the sciences have somehow dislodged the claims of God. The domain of the sciences is matter and the material world. Our eternal and boundless spiritual souls have relationship with the material world and our material selves, where the soul meets the brain, but they do not intersect with it. Jesus comprised two distinct persons and two distinct wills, one Divine and one human. Everything we shall learn through the prism of our own souls will attest these distinctions.

The question before us on the final Sunday before the Nativity is what we will unfold when we open the fair linen of our hearts before Him. Who are we? What are we? As we set about answering these questions, we must be wary of delusion.

There is a very great difference between being in love with the idea of Christian conversion and conversion itself, wrote Alice von Hildebrand:

We may fall into the illusion that clicking on Facebook and Instagram posts somehow initiates us or keeps us in the life in Christ. Certainly, spiritual encouragements are an important part of the journey, but they are not the journey itself. The journey only consists in doing and being, becoming transformed.

Speaking personally, we at the Hermitage have discovered that all of our growth has come through committing and doing. A long time ago, the Sisters committed to the Roman Catholic apostolate. For many decades they lived into a beautiful spirituality evinced in the Western saints. They followed this life of prayer. They labored in the vineyards of Christ. And it was this road of committing and of doing that has led us to the fullness of the Church.

It is an illusion that we could read and pray with the ancient Church in spirit, yet remain outside of her in fact. It is a demonstrable truth that our conversion has deepened more in the past four years, since entering the ancient Church, than in the decades preceding. You see, another encounter awaited us, here in our extreme old age. The God Who has been calling us day-by-day had still more for us. And we responded. We acted. We were baptized (yes, we requested baptism in her most ancient rite). We were chrismated. We were consecrated to monastic life. And the Hermitage priest was ordained that He might be a servant of the Mysteries in our humble chapel. All of these things poured sacramental graces over us, opened our eyes to the leading of angels, and removed every impediment to the power of the Holy Spirit.

For on this day, when our Church reminds us that it all comes down to us — real flesh-and-blood people who are crucial to God's plan — it turns out that it is not all about us. In a decisive act, we give ourselves over to something far more glorious: the power and grace of God. It is an on-going process: every day and every night. We open ourselves. We empty ourselves. We are filled. We are filled beyond our furthest imaginations. Our heart stretches with this joy and love until we feel it could burst. And it is here, in this blissfully helpless state, that we realize that it has never been about us, but always already about Him.

Soon He will lie before us as the helpless infant, reminding us of two truths: He looks to us to be His instruments of compassion, even of grace, yet He is the source and summit of our lives .... and of all things. This paradox, this mystery, is captured in the central principle of spiritual life on earth: His limit is our Yes.

He opens all possibility before us. And He has gathered and breathed life into His visible Kingdom on earth, which is His imperishable and eternal Church. All are destined for this Kingdom whether they want to be, or not. Our Maker has ordained this by setting His Image upon our faces and a Heavenly birthright in our souls and by setting us on a path that proceeds from Him and ends in Him. But it remains for us, mysteriously, to claim it, to act on it, to do it. The Kingdom is open to all. It is our fate and destination. Mysteriously, we must choose for it.

In a letter written by St. Cyprian of Carthage (b. 210), we find a pronouncement attested by the Church ever after and, to be sure, by the Apostles preceding it:

To be part of the Kingdom is to be part of the Church. We must choose. For our God has set the scene of a cosmic drama which is reenacted in every life. It takes the form of an encounter — of an archangel with the Most Holy Mother of God. This is our eternal example and canon. All things are laid before us as they were laid before Her. Yes, these things will mean privation, even suffering, but they are the all, the everything, and the only-thing-that-matters. What shall we do? What shall we say?

In a mystery owing to His gift of our sovereign freedom, our answer might be any answer: as deep as Hell and as dark as eternal death or as light and spacious as unending Heaven. It might be any answer. But, as is always the case with God, there is a right answer. And our Blessed Mother has chosen "the good part" (Lu 10:42). Let this also be said of us .... that he or she chose and said and did the good part:

For our "God .... [has] provided something better for us, that [the Patriarchs] should not be made perfect apart from us"   (Heb 11:39-40).

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.