Today is Jan 8., Wednesday after the Epiphany.
We read in Scripture at today’s Mass, “Beloved, if God so loved us, we also must love one another. No one has ever seen God. Yet, if we love one another, God remains in us, and his love is brought to perfection in us.”
There is a tension in the Christian life between seeing and loving. On this side of eternity, we do not see God face-to-face. Francis de Sales observed in his Introduction to the Devout Life, “We do not see God, who is present amongst us; and, though faith assures us of His presence, yet not beholding Him with our eyes, we too often forget Him, and behave ourselves as though He were at a far distance from us.” Without seeing God before us, it is easy to forget how He loved us.
The Christmas mystery is that Christ did in fact come before our eyes. The Virgin Mary gazed upon the face of the Savior. Joseph looked into the eyes of God. Shepherds and kings fell to the ground before him. They saw, and they loved.
‘Closer to us than we are to ourselves’
But we, without God present before us, are subject to forgetting. This forgetting is not merely a lapse of memory but a failure to recognize the divine presence in our midst. God is closer to us than we are to ourselves. He dwells within us, in a special way in the hearts of the baptized.
So what are we to do? Francis de Sales says we should stir our hearts up before prayer. We should raise our minds to God and recall that he is present to us. We should imagine Christ as a friend very near to us. Images of Christ help too, to look upon a statue or a crucifix, the same way we look upon a photo of a family member. To see an image of the one we love calls that one to mind. And if we can, of course, we should put ourselves in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament to pray, to be in His actual presence, to be near the one we love.
Let us pray,
O God, who bestows light on all the nations, grant your peoples the gladness of lasting peace and pour into our hearts that brilliant light by which you purified the minds of our fathers in faith. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever. Amen.
