For this week’s homily please watch the video below.

Nobody goes through life alone. We may think we do, but from the beginning others are part of our life. They care for us, guide and support us; they’re with us. So whatever we may think, we don’t go through life alone.

Our two readings today, the 2nd Sunday of the year, tells us that. Our first reading is a wonderful reading from the Book of Samuel. The young boy Samuel is sleeping in the temple near the ark of God and he hears someone calling him, but he doesn’t know who it is or what’s happening.

 So he goes to the old priest Eli and asks him. “Did you call me. What do you want?” “No I didn’t call you, go back to sleep,” the old priest says. Three times this happens. 

Eli is supposed to be the young boy’s mentor, but sometimes mentors don’t have all the answers.

Finally, the priest recognizes this isn’t a nightmare or the boy’s imagination.  Go to sleep and when you hear that call say, “Speak Lord, your servant is listening.”

We don’t go through life alone. Above all, God’s with us. God’s a quiet presence in our lives, and we recognize him only by listening, by humbly listening. “Speak, Lord, your servant is listening. 

Our reading says young Samuel was not familiar with God. None of are, I suppose. But one of the most important things we do in life is to become familiar with God, to recognize the presence of God in our life.

And how do we do this? By putting aside things that preoccupy us, that make us self-absorbed and self-centered, humbly recognizing the presence of God as we go on day by day .”Speak, Lord, your servant is listening.” 

We have to admit we are living in a world today that seems to recognize God less and less. Our culture is almost deaf to God’s presence, and that deafness brings about a loneliness that’s part of life today. There’s a lot of loneliness in our world today. We’re missing the wisdom of God.

We’re not meant to go through life alone.

Our gospel reading from John’s gospel is about the call of the disciples. Like Samuel, their call involved listening, listening to Jesus. “This is my beloved Son, listen to him,” a heavenly voice at the Jordan River says when Jesus was baptized. The followers of Jesus are called to listen to him. We miss so much when we don’t listen to him.

Our reading reminds us also that people were brought to Jesus by someone else. John the Baptist points him out to some, Andrew brings his brother Peter to him. Philip brings Nathaniel. There are people always with us in life, inviting us, supporting us, pointing things out to us, and we in turn are called to invite and support others. 

We don’t go through life alone. We go to God together. We belong to a church. Some people today believe they don’t need a church anymore. They can do it all themselves. But we go to God together.

Dorothy Day, who worked for the poor in the last century over in the Bowery in New York City and was one of the great women of our time, was asked why did she stayed in the church. She was a pacifist against war; she often got into conflict with bishops and fellow Catholics over her strong positions. She was asked why she kept going to church if she found so much opposition there.

“I had heard many say that they wanted to worship God in their own way and did not need a Church in which to praise him, nor a body of people with whom to associate themselves. But I did not agree to this. My very experience as a radical, my whole make-up, led me to want to associate with others, with the masses, in loving and praising God.” (p. 139)

She wrote that in her autobiography, “The Long Loneliness,” a spiritual classic from a woman of faith living with broken humanity.

We are not alone in life. God is with us. We need to grow in familiarity with God. We go to go together. 

The Jewish scriptures tell us we need prophets and people with vision, and we need to encourage them. Isn’t that still true today?

In the Book of Samuel, which we’re reading today, a young boy Samuel is looking for advice from Eli, an old priest in the temple at Shilo. The old priest is not very good at giving advice. He almost sent Samuel’s mother Hannah away when she came to the temple to pray for a son.

Young Samuel hears God calling in the night but it’s a very indistinct call; he’s a young boy and doesn’t know what to make of it. The old priest Eli doesn’t help much at first. No one’s there, he says, go back to sleep. The temple at Shilo is a sleepy place.

Finally, the old man recognizes God’s calling the young boy. “Go to sleep, and if you are called say ‘Speak, Lord, your servant is listening'”, he says to the young boy.

Wise advice. Believe that God speaks to you. Believe, even in the night. Listen humbly like a servant. Don’t let the darkness of night or your own small vision dissuade you. God has a mission for you. Listen. Pray.

“ I have a mission…I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons. God has not created me for naught…Therefore I will trust him. What ever, where ever I am, I can never be thrown away. God does nothing in vain. He knows what he is about.” (John Henry Newman)

Our churches can become sleepy places. “Boring, boring” people say.

Speak, Lord, and help us to listen.

The recent papal declaration, Fiducia supplicans,  explains Pope Francis’ permission for priests blessing same sex couples and explores the meaning of blessings. The issue goes beyond priests and same sex marriage, the declaration points out. To understand it we need to understand the God of Blessing.

“The great blessing of God is Jesus Christ. He is the great gift of God, his own Son. He is a blessing for all humanity, a blessing that has saved us all. He is the Eternal Word, with whom the Father blessed us ‘while we were still sinners’ (Rom. 5:8), as St. Paul says. He is the Word made flesh, offered for us on the cross.” (Pope Francis)

In the light of God who blesses, the declaration asks us to broaden and enrich our understanding of blessing. 

We bless in our liturgy, a “blessing  that requires what is blessed be conformed to God’s will, as expressed in the teachings of the Church… For this reason, since the Church has always considered only those sexual relations that are lived out within marriage to be morally licit, the Church does not have the power to confer its liturgical blessing when that would somehow offer a form of moral legitimacy to a union that presumes to be a marriage or to an extra-marital sexual practice.”

Yet blessings go beyond liturgy and the moral conditions required for receiving  sacraments. Limiting blessings to the liturgy limits the  unconditional power of God’s love at the heart of blessing, according to the pope. We should not “lose pastoral charity, which should permeate all our decisions and attitudes” and avoid being “judges who only deny, reject, and exclude.” (12,13)

The papal declaration explores the variety of blessings in the Old and New Testament. In the Old Testament God blesses and people respond: “ Melchizedek, King of Salem, blesses Abram (cf. Gen. 14:19); Rebekah is blessed by family members just before she becomes the bride of Isaac (cf. Gen. 24:60), who, in turn, blesses his son, Jacob (cf. Gen. 27:27). Jacob blesses Pharaoh (cf. Gen. 47:10), his own grandsons, Ephraim and Manasseh (cf. Gen. 48:20), and his twelve sons (cf. Gen. 49:28). Moses and Aaron bless the community (cf. Ex. 39:43; Lev. 9:22). The heads of households bless their children at weddings, before embarking on a journey, and in the imminence of death. These blessings, accordingly, appear to be a superabundant and unconditional gift.”

In the New Testament “Jesus blessed children: And he took them in his arms and blessed them, laying his hands upon them” (Mk. 10:16). And Jesus’ earthly journey will end precisely with a final blessing reserved for the Eleven, shortly before he ascends to the Father: “And lifting up his hands he blessed them. While he blessed them, he parted from them and was carried up into heaven” (Lk. 24:50-51). The last image of  Jesus on earth is that of his hands raised in the act of blessing.”

The papal declaration looks to the blessings described in the scriptures offered to all without requiring anything. “It is God who blesses. From the first pages of the Bible, there is a continual repetition of blessings. God blesses, but humans also give blessings, and soon it turns out that the blessing possesses a special power, which accompanies those who receive it throughout their lives, and disposes man’s heart to be changed by God.

So we are more important to God than all the sins we can commit because he is father, he is mother, he is pure love, he has blessed us forever. And he will never stop blessing us.

It is a powerful experience to read these biblical texts of blessing in a prison or in a rehabilitation group. To make those people feel that they are still blessed, notwithstanding their serious mistakes, that their heavenly Father continues to will their good and to hope that they will ultimately open themselves to the good. Even if their closest relatives have abandoned them, because they now judge them to be irredeemable, God always sees them as his children.”

The papal declaration offers priests the opportunity to bless same sex unions with a devotional, not liturgical blessing. But they are not the only ones who bless. The whole church is called to bless the world. The declaration calls for all of us to recover our role as children of God who blesses. 

We might start with the simple words from everyday life and everyday prayers. “In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”  We bless ourselves as individuals. Saint or sinner, we personally look to God for the blessing that comes from the Cross of Christ. “Good bye,” is an old phrase for “God be with you,” a blessing also found in words like “Good night”, “Good day”.  “Bless the Lord, all you works of the Lord, glory and praise him forever.”  We bless the world before us, human beings like ourselves and all the creatures of the earth. 

Everyday phrases, everyday prayers express a God who blesses.

Pope Francis explained the origins of our Christmas crib:

“Let us go back to the origins of the Christmas crèche so familiar to us. We need to imagine ourselves in the little Italian town of Greccio, near Rieti. Saint Francis stopped there, most likely on his way back from Rome where on 29 November 1223 he had received the confirmation of his Rule from Pope Honorius III. Francis had earlier visited the Holy Land, and the caves in Greccio reminded him of the countryside of Bethlehem. It may also be that the “Poor Man of Assisi” had been struck by the mosaics in the Roman Basilica of Saint Mary Major depicting the birth of Jesus, close to the place where, according to an ancient tradition, the wooden panels of the manger are preserved.

The Franciscan Sources describe in detail what then took place in Greccio. Fifteen days before Christmas, Francis asked a local man named John to help him realize his desire “to bring to life the memory of that babe born in Bethlehem, to see as much as possible with my own bodily eyes the discomfort of his infant needs, how he lay in a manger, and how, with an ox and an ass standing by, he was laid upon a bed of hay”.[1] At this, his faithful friend went immediately to prepare all that the Saint had asked. On 25 December, friars came to Greccio from various parts, together with people from the farmsteads in the area, who brought flowers and torches to light up that holy night. When Francis arrived, he found a manger full of hay, an ox and a donkey. All those present experienced a new and indescribable joy in the presence of the Christmas scene. The priest then solemnly celebrated the Eucharist over the manger, showing the bond between the Incarnation of the Son of God and the Eucharist. At Greccio there were no statues; the nativity scene was enacted and experienced by all who were present.[2]

This is how our tradition began: with everyone gathered in joy around the cave, with no distance between the original event and those sharing in its mystery.

Thomas of Celano, the first biographer of Saint Francis, notes that this simple and moving scene was accompanied by the gift of a marvellous vision: one of those present saw the Baby Jesus himself lying in the manger. From the nativity scene of that Christmas in 1223, “everyone went home with joy”.[3]

With the simplicity of that sign, Saint Francis carried out a great work of evangelization. His teaching touched the hearts of Christians and continues today to offer a simple yet authentic means of portraying the beauty of our faith. Indeed, the place where this first nativity scene was enacted expresses and evokes these sentiments. Greccio has become a refuge for the soul, a mountain fastness wrapped in silence.

Why does the Christmas crèche arouse such wonder and move us so deeply? First, because it shows God’s tender love: the Creator of the universe lowered himself to take up our littleness. The gift of life, in all its mystery, becomes all the more wondrous as we realize that the Son of Mary is the source and sustenance of all life. In Jesus, the Father has given us a brother who comes to seek us out whenever we are confused or lost, a loyal friend ever at our side. He gave us his Son who forgives us and frees us from our sins.

Setting up the Christmas crèche in our homes helps us to relive the history of what took place in Bethlehem. Naturally, the Gospels remain our source for understanding and reflecting on that event. At the same time, its portrayal in the crèche helps us to imagine the scene. It touches our hearts and makes us enter into salvation history as contemporaries of an event that is living and real in a broad gamut of historical and cultural contexts.”