Second Sunday of Advent
One of the great memories in my life is my pilgrimage in northern Spain to the tomb of St. James the Greater, Apostle in 2004.
Eight of my fellow seminarians who were studying in Rome and I walked 110 km. in five days from a little town of Sarria to the city of Santiago de Compostela, the resting place of the remains of St. James. Generally we would wake up around 5:30 a.m., get walking at about 6 a.m., and finish walking around 1 p.m., before it got too hot. We averaged a little over 20 km, or 12.5 miles per day. It was an amazing trip, with beautiful landscapes. But I have to admit, rolling landscapes are much easier to look at than walk. I was in much better shape in 2004, but even then I needed ace wraps for both my knees, which were ready to give out after only two days of walking. Honestly, walking up the hills was easier than walking down them, and a make-shift walking stick was a great aide to the pilgrimage.
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| One of the mornings as we started to walk |
So for me, the first reading and Gospel, which talk about mountains being made low, and valleys being filled in, makes perfect sense to me. A flat land is much easier to traverse. And let’s remember, whether it was during the time of the Prophet Baruch in the sixth century BC, or around the year AD 30 when Jesus was doing His public ministry, there weren’t cars to drive you, trains to take you, or Ubers to call, so hills and valleys were tough, whether it was on the knees of a donkey or the knees of a human.
Jesus makes things easier. He levels out the road to salvation. It may not always seem that way, but it’s true. In order to find salvation, we need to follow Jesus. It’s that simple, and that difficult. No longer do we have to try to figure out if this or that prophet was really sent by God. No longer do we have to make yearly pilgrimages to Jerusalem for the great Jewish feasts. All we need to do is follow Jesus. Even Jesus Himself tells us to take His yoke upon our shoulders, for His yoke is easy, and His burden light, and we will find rest for ourselves.
Our Catholic faith is simply following Jesus as the full and final manifestation of who God is. Our understanding of the Trinity comes from Jesus, who revealed the Communion of Three Divine Persons. All the letters of St. Paul, the letters of St. Peter, the letter of St. Jude, the Letter to the Hebrews, the Letters of St. John, and the Book of Revelation are simply Jesus continuing to teach through those He appointed to act in His Name, so that, as He said, “Whoever listens to you, listens to me.” All that the Church has taught as necessary for salvation throughout these nearly two millennia is Jesus teaching us what we are to believe and how we are to live. This is done through the pope and the bishops in union with him, in a variety of different settings and different ways. But at the end of the day, it’s simply following Jesus.
I’ve been, for some time, very impressed with Bishop Robert Barron, who is an auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles. Before that he was a priest of the Archdiocese of Chicago, and founded Word on Fire, an evangelistic Catholic ministry whose work is to spread the Gospel. In particular, Bishop Barron focuses on beauty as a way to evangelize, rather than outlining the “rules” of Catholicism and defending them. There is something to this, as the leveling out of the hills and valleys. Rules can seem like efforts to climb and descend. But beauty is something for which we were made. St. Augustine says it this way in his work, The Confessions:
Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you! You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you. In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things which you created. You were with me, but I was not with you. Created things kept me from you; yet if they had not been in you they would have not been at all. You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness. You flashed, you shone, and you dispelled my blindness. You breathed your fragrance on me; I drew in breath and now I pant for you. I have tasted you, now I hunger and thirst for more. You touched me, and I burned for your peace.”
God is Beauty itself, just as He is also Truth itself and Goodness itself. But Beauty is often more accessible than truth. Bishop Barron talks about baseball, one of his great loves, and says that no one really gets into baseball by simply studying the rules. There is a beauty to the game which attracts the person to it. But, he also states that, in order to play the game well, you need to know the rules, and the rules actually make you a freer baseball player. Still, no one learns about the infield fly rule, and then says, “I really want to play baseball!” They play because of the beauty of the game.
In regards to our faith, Jesus is the one who attracts us, or should attract us, because, as Pope Benedict XVI said in Deus caritas est, his Encyclical Letter of 2005, “Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with…a person,” and that person is Jesus Christ. If we have encountered that Person, if we love that Person, then all the other rules fall into place, make sense, and help us to encounter Jesus and love Jesus more. That is the easy way, the level path, the road to salvation: falling in love with Jesus and following all that He teaches us because of our love. No hills, no valleys, just a level pilgrimage to the goal of every human life: eternal happiness with God in heaven.
