On this first day of winter and the last weekend of Advent we are grateful for our Prep community and all that it has to offer in this most holy season of anticipation and hope anew. We celebrated our Advent Mass yesterday after completion of midterms with cocoa and cookies to follow.

Our Seniors opened the Mass with a procession of lights, and German teacher Mrs. Erika McGinn gave a beautiful personal reflection on the Christmas spirit. As she recounted stories from her childhood growing up in Hungary, Mrs. McGinn reflected, "We are all as small and vulnerable as that Christ child in the manger. But it is also true that the miraculous star is always above each and every one of us. Just look into the eyes of a person and you will find it. Sometimes it does not come easy, but then we just have to look a bit longer to discover it twinkle."  

Father Van Dyke gave the homily on 20 December, 2024 to the Prep community:

…on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.
– Luke:2:14 

My brothers and sisters, one of the problems with Christmas – now that’s a lovely start to a Christmas homily, isn’t it – one of the problems with Christmas, I say, is that it’s too damn pretty.  It’s just too easy to get lost in the lights and the baubles, the tunes and the tinsel, the gatherings and the get-togethers, the family and the friends, the bows and the boxes.  Now, please don’t get me wrong: there is absolutely nothing wrong with all of this, and if you don’t enjoy them, you’re a cold callous misanthrope, and you probably don’t even have a dog named Max.

No, the problem is that we can settle for all that – for the visions of sugar plums – we can settle for it and really miss the point.  You see, while those things are wonderful, they have very little to do with what we actually celebrate.

We heard in the Martyrology – that Christmas Proclamation with which we opened our prayer today – that “the whole earth was at peace” when Jesus was born.  Now, I don’t want to be critical, but the author took a little poetic license there.  Yes, the world – or more correctly the Roman world – was largely at peace – it was, after all, the era known as the Pax Romana – largely at peace, but not because it was peaceful or peaceable.  No, the world into which Jesus was born was at peace only because it was occupied by a brutal force commanded by an emperor and his minions – a brutal force, I might add, that one day this new born babe would come up against, face to face.  

So why do I mentions this when we should be collectively Harking the Herald Angels?  For a very simple reason, my brothers and sisters, for a very simple reason: we still live in that world – a world where might is thought to make right, where possession is claimed to be nine tenths of the law, where life is far too cheap, as we saw yet again the other day at a school in Madison, Wisconsin.

And yet, in the story we heard – the story that must be at the core of our celebration if our celebration is to have any meaning more than a bacchanal – that story proposes something quite different.  We hear it in those words: Now this is how the birth of Jesus Christ came about…

It is the story of a young women – somebody no older than most of us gathered here this morning – the story of a young woman who trusted her God.  It is the story of a man whose heart was broken – a man who could have and maybe should have sought justice, but instead chose compassion for the person who had wounded him, who chose to take the woman and her child into his home, who chose to take that woman and that child into his heart as his own wife and his own son.  It is the story of a God who, seeing the cruel powers of this world, chose to suffer them as we do so that death might not have the last word, so that new birth and new life, that hope might triumph in our hearts.

And that, my brothers and sisters, that is what we are called to celebrate.  And not only to celebrate, but also to live.  Because this is how the birth of Jesus Christ still comes about: when we chose not to exercise the cruel powers that we each possess, when we chose not to part of the empire – not even to be our own little petty emperor – when we chose to trust the larger good that our God proposes, when we chose compassion over so-called justice or revenge, when we chose to love – for love is a choice.  

It is there that peace will be born – true peace, that peace that surpasses all understanding (Phil 4:7) – for trust and compassion and love…those are at the very heart of God, and when we exercise them – and they do need exercise as surely as any muscle – when we exercise them, we ourselves are born anew like Christ, the Prince of Peace, as his brothers and sisters, which is what our God has always dreamed for us.

AMDG