Embracing God’s Will: A Personal Reflection & Christmas Mass Update
Change in the Christmas Mass Schedule; Readings for December 22, 2024, 4th Sunday of Advent; Virtual Homily; My Brilliant Sophomores; Christmas in Caracas (and a BIG Thank You to Brentwood!)
Readings for Mass this Sunday
Micah 5:1-4
Psalm 80:2-3, 15-19
Hebrews 10:5-10
Luke 1:39-45
Dear Friends and Family,
We've made a change in the Christmas Mass schedule that I want to make folks aware of: I now have the five PM "family Mass" on Christmas Eve, in addition to the ten PM "midnight" Mass and the nine AM Christmas morning Mass. All three of these Masses are in English. The family Mass at five on Christmas Eve is very popular; I recommend arriving early if you want to be able to sit.
Though preachers around the world this Sunday may choose to go in any of several different directions with today's near-Christmas readings, I want to focus on their Marian element; it has deep resonance for our lives.
The first reading from Micah is one of the several direct prophecies of the Blessed Mother found in the Old Testament. "...when she is to give birth has borne" the prophet writes, then great things will begin to happen for Israel (vs. 2). And not just Israel. Micah continues:
Then the rest of his kindred shall return to the children of Israel. He shall take his place as shepherd by the strength of the Lord, by the majestic name of the Lord, his God; and they shall dwell securely, for now his greatness shall reach to the ends of the earth...(vss. 2-3).
Micah foresees, in the birth of the Messiah, the salvation of the world. "...she who is to give birth" may have seemed a cryptic and shadowy reference to the Jewish people of Micah's time, but we, of course, in retrospect, see the Blessed Mother and her huge role in salvation history clearly delineated in this prophecy.
The Gospel passage is, of course, the Annunciation; Gabriel inviting Mary to become the mother of the Messiah. I actually gave my in-person homily last week on this very passage, the week having been huge with Marian energy in the parish, given both the Immaculate Conception and Our Lady of Guadalupe. I focused in the spoken homily on Mary's "yes" and what that yes entailed. Among other things, it entailed standing at the foot of the Cross, thirty-three years later, but much more proximate to Gabriel's visit, it entailed the Blessed Mother having to deal with Joseph's intention to "divorce her quietly" upon his discovery of her pregnancy (Matthew 1:19).
My point last Sunday and this is that we never know what we are signing up for, when we say "yes" to God. My married siblings and cousins have assured me that the day they took their vows, they essentially took a leap in the dark. Married life has proved to be the fulfillment of many of their hopes and dreams but also an invitation to adventures, some of them stormy and at times perilous, that they never saw coming.
I can draw a parallel with priesthood. When Bishop Vigneron ordained me on May 20, 2006, I imagined I was saying "yes" to fulltime parish ministry for most, if not all, of my years of active service as a priest of Oakland. And that seeming likelihood made me very happy; I had had enough experience of parish ministry, at that point, to know how much I loved it. The thought of a high school chaplaincy never entered my head.
But in fact the O'Dowd assignment was wrapped up in my "yes," in my promise of obedience to Bishop Vigneron and his successors. And a telling aspect of it all is that the assignment to O'Dowd was over two decades in the making, in that the Spirit had been preparing me for it all that time.
My "yes" to priesthood dates to July, 1992, when on a seven-day silent retreat at Christ the King, the Passionist retreat center in Citrus Heights, I was able to recognize and respond to a clear invitation from the Lord to consider life as a priest. Within days of my completing the retreat I found myself with an invitation to minister to teens: Sister Evelyn Schwall, then Director of Faith Formation in the Marysville parish, asked me if I would be willing to assist in teaching one of the Confirmation classes. Two years later I was running the parish Confirmation program and a year after that, because the Marysville teens were asking for me, I became the parish's youth minister.
Twenty-three years before I took up the assignment at O'Dowd, in other words, the Spirit called me into teen catechesis and youth ministry. This was, to borrow from Mother Teresa, "the call within the call," though I did not recognize it at the time. I came to understand that my call to serve the young was a lifelong matter, a true vocational call, only with the assignment to O'Dowd. Right up to that point, that is, right up to 2015 and nine years after my ordination, I had assumed that I would become a pastor and finally relinquish teen ministry.
Instead of which, prepared by the Spirit with twenty-three years of experience for it, in 2015 I stepped into the greatest teen assignment of my life. Youth ministry has changed me, changed my life. And it has defined my priesthood.
Doubtful and reluctant as I was to accept the assignment to the high school, now in my tenth year at O'Dowd, I could not be more deeply certain that this was and is God's will for my priesthood. I can see, I can feel, the difference God is making in the lives of our precious teen-agers at Bishop O'Dowd. This is a somewhat rarefied ministry; I am amazed at how the Spirit has moved through my life now, for thirty-two years, in service to the young. I did not see it coming; not in 1992, and not even in 2015. But it was there from the start, in my "yes" to God.
On the subject of teens, we are done for the semester at O'Dowd. This was Finals Week, and though I had no finals, I did have my students' final project to grade, this week. I described the project an e-mail or two back -- write up the Resurrection Narratives as though you were a reporter for the WaPo or the WSJ or ABC News --and I remember saying how much I enjoyed reading what my students would come up with, in these "news reports" of the Resurrection.
The final project is a 100-point assignment (one of only two 100-pointers all semester). Oh my gosh. I was counting up how many 100s I gave, this week, as I was calculating semester grades, and...I smiled. Almost one-third of my students this fall scored a perfect 100 on the final project. That is how detailed, how imaginative, how well-laid-out and illustrated, how deeply reported, the accounts by my young "investigative journalists" were.
It was a genuine delight to read their interviews with Mary Magdalen, with Joanna, with Judas, with Pilate, with Peter and John, with the Roman guards, with Cleopas (who encountered the risen Lord on the road to Emmaus Easter Sunday afternoon). I loved looking at the many paintings and photos (of statues, of places in the Holy Land, etc.) that my sophomores used to brighten up their reports. They made the page layouts eye-catching and attractive, using different fonts, brightly colored borders and so on. I had fun, as I knew I would, grading the final report, this past week. I am proud, of O'Dowd.
With school off my radar I have had time this week for other ministry considerations, including my young men in Venezuela, and their families. Friends in Brentwood (whom I am certain would ask for anonymity here) and I got together for a holiday lunch early in the week and they gave me a very generous donation for Caracas. I have been hearing from my Caraquenos all week as a result: astonished gratitude at what they will now be able to do for their families for Christmas. Even $100 American goes a very long way in impoverished Venezuela.
That obnoxious (but completely accurate) phrase -- "impoverished Venezuela" -- bespeaks more than simple misrule by the "socialist" clique that has a stranglehold on the country. It illuminates countless mortal sins on the part of the gang of criminals that styles itself the Venezuelan government. As I have admitted before, I abandoned hope that this crew might be rooted out anytime this decade, back before this decade started. I abandoned hope for a free and once-again prosperous Venezuela when the 2019 uprising, supported by more than fifty nations around the world in their recognition of Juan Guaido as the rightful leader of the nation, collapsed. TMI if I go on (and believe me, I could go on and on...I will spare you.)
For this e-mail's purposes I will just observe that Brentwood gave Caracas a kiss this week; my hard-working and highly responsible young friends in that beautiful but captive metropolis are having a much merrier Christmas than they and their families would have had, otherwise. THANK YOU, Brentwood!
All right, it is Saturday morning as I am finishing this and I need to get it out. Take good care and God bless.
And Merry Christmas!
Love and joy,
Fr. Brawn