Monday of the Fourth Week of Advent
Advent ends tomorrow at sundown. As Christmas looms ever so close amid what can be very hectic days, let us pause and meditate on these simple words of Saint Oscar Romero:
No one can celebrate a genuine Christmas without being truly poor. The self-sufficient, the proud, those who, because they have everything, look down on others, those who have no need even of God — for them there will be no Christmas. Only the poor, the hungry, those who need someone to come on their behalf, will have that someone. That someone is God. Emmanuel, God-with-us. Without poverty of spirit there can be no abundance of God.
—Saint Oscar Romero, bishop and martyr.
It does us well, I think, in these days of abundance and even opulence, to recall that the Word was made flesh in poverty. Christ was born poor and he died poor. He never did the things that would make him “successful” in our 21st century means of measurement. It may do us well to recall the ever popular “One Solitary Life,” attributed to James Allen Francis:
He was born in an obscure village, the child of a peasant. He grew up in another village, where he worked in a carpenter shop until he was 30. Then, for three years, he was an itinerant preacher.
He never wrote a book. He never held high office. He never had a family or owned a home. He didn’t go to college. He never lived in a big city. He never travelled 100 miles from the place where he was born. He did none of the things that usually accompany greatness. He had no credentials but himself.
He was only 33 when the tide of public opinion turned against him. His friends ran away. One of them denied him. He was turned over to his enemies and went through the mockery of a trail. He was nailed to a cross between two revolutionaries. While he was dying, his executioners gambled for his garments, the only property he had on earth. When he was dead, he was laid in a borrowed grave, through the pity of a friend.
Twenty plus centuries have come and gone, and today he is the central figure of the human race. I am well within the mark when I say that all the armies that ever marched, all the navies that ever sailed, all the parliaments that ever sat, all the kings that ever reigned – put together – have not affected the life of humankind on earth as much as that one solitary life.
—Timothy J. Cronin