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Dear Parish Family,
The 3rd Sunday in Advent is ‘Gaudete’ Sunday (from the Latin meaning “rejoice”) which is taken from Philippians 4:4-5, the Entrance Antiphon of the day. The color Rose will be used as the priest will wear a rose chasuble and we will light the rose candle on the Advent wreath. Rose symbolizes joy, the joy that Jesus is almost here. When parents get ready to bring a new baby home, they typically paint the baby’s room pink or blue. They do this out of joy for to baby’s arrival. Advent’s themes of happiness and hope can annoy someone who hurts. When you are burdened with the chaff of ego or the weight of anxieties, forced joy and canned glee disgust the best of persons.
Yet it is nothing but our diminishment, our losses, our sadness, our weight of sin that Advent confronts and calls us out of. Somehow it is the pathos of our own melancholy that must be laughed away. It is our sense of exile, our cramped confinement, the dross of our psychic baggage that must be burned off by the fire of love. There is in everyone a need to unburden. Sometimes we cannot put a finger to the source or tenor of our malaise.
The crowds John encountered had, themselves, little reason for joy. Aware of their own need for deliverance, living under the shackles of Roman rule, they felt a glimmer of anticipation that he might be the messiah. He counseled justice and rectitude, but the promise he spoke of was something far more than they might have suspected or wanted: “I am baptizing you with water, but there is one to come who is mightier than I. He will baptize you in the Holy Spirit and in fire. His winnowing fan is in his hand to clear his threshing floor and gather the wheat into his granary, but the chaff he will burn in unquenchable fire.”
John the Baptist is referring to the fire which is part of the baptism in Jesus and his spirit. Fire is not the fate of the lost, but the refining of the blessed. We all have our chaff, our dross, our waste. We all have our winnowing. And it is the fire of Christ that will burn it away. The burdens we carry do not make us unfit for Advent’s message. They qualify us as prime candidates. The only exit from Dante’s ‘Purgatorio’ was a wall of fire. Once the pain was burned away by love, the other side was Paradise, sheer joy.
Here is an excerpt from an article on Mother Theresa that explains the movement through pain to joy - Mother Teresa left happiness to find joy. The difference between happiness and joy is that happiness avoids suffering and joy endures suffering in hope. To say that Mother Teresa left happiness to find joy means that she went towards suffering in hope. The suffering was not first hers, though it became hers because she stayed close to those who suffer. The suffering in Teresa’s joy was first of all Christ’s, who suffered in and with the Poorest of the Poor. With them—they who were “unwanted, unclaimed, unloved”—Teresa heard, over and over again, the plaintive cry of Christ on the Cross: “I thirst” (Jn 19:28). Thirsty for care, thirsty for contact, thirsty for love. Mother Teresa left her own comfort to comfort those whom no one comforted. To leave comfort was painful, but that pain bore “something beautiful for God.”Fr. Tom Kunnel. C.O.