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January 7, 2008 • VOL. 46, NO. 1 • Oakland,
CA
In
His Light
Our mission in 2008:
Live in hope, labor for peace
Dear Friends in Christ,
So, we’ve begun another year — reckoned as the two thousand
and eighth “Year of Grace” since the birth of our Savior,
Jesus Christ. As I think about our starting the year, I have several considerations
I want to share with you.
First, I’ve been thinking a lot about the wish for a “Happy
New Year” which is the usual tag line for the greeting “Merry
Christmas.”
We certainly do begin each year hoping that it will be happy, filled with
blessings. However, even expressing the wish shows that we recognize that
there are alternative scenarios. The future is “chancy.” There
is the very real possibility that the year ahead will not only contain
blessings but hardships.
Such chances are as real for the followers of Christ as they are for our
neighbors. For example, 2008 might not look like such a “happy”
year after all, since it could be the one with the news of lay-offs at
work or the diagnosis of a serious illness.
However, our stance in the face of life’s uncertainties is particular.
It is the stance of hope — a hope for a “Happy 2008”
based on our unshakable trust in God’s all-powerful love for us.
We have just celebrated the great event of the birth in our flesh of God
the Son. God is with us — and he is never going away, will never
leave us. Even death could not take him from us.
Jesus Christ is risen from the dead, has filled our weak humanity with
his own divine life. He fills every hour of time and every space in our
world with himself. There is nowhere and no moment from which God is absent
(except, of course, my own heart, if I freely choose to exclude him, but
even then he’s available on instant notice as soon as I invite him).
So, we are right to affirm at its very beginning that 2008 — most
of whose days contains who knows what — is a year of grace. “All
times and seasons” belong to the Son of God, who became the Son
of Mary. “For those who love God,” St. Paul tells us, “all
things work unto good” (Rm. 8: 28).
In fact, in this chapter of the Letter to the Romans, St. Paul speaks
eloquently of the hope with which we can confidently look forward to a
Happy New Year:
“With God on our side who can be against us…. Nothing therefore
can come between us and the love of Christ, even if we are troubled or
worried, or being persecuted, or lacking food or clothes, or being threatened
or even attacked. For I am certain of this: …nothing that exists…
can come between us and the love of God made visible in Christ Jesus our
Lord” (Rm. 8: 31, 35, 38-39).
So as I wish you a Happy New Year, I invite you to thank God ahead of
time for what we are sure he will do to make it happy for us.
My second reflection concerns the two different ways the Church celebrates
New Year’s Day: either as the Solemnity of Mary the Mother of God
or the World Day of Peace.
Admittedly, these seem to call to mind very different ideas, and it might
not be clear at first how these two celebrations belong on the same day.
But they do. As I said above, it is because God the Son was born into
time of the Virgin Mary that he is our invincible Prince of Peace.
And it is because of our confidence in Jesus that we, his disciples, take
up the work of being peacemakers. Because God the Son has a human mother,
we pray and work for peace with trust.
In every age this is a pressing task. In this moment of God’s time
there are many fronts on which we are called to be active. Without slighting
or undervaluing any of them, I want to underscore a sphere that is particularly
important for us in the East Bay.
In many of our communities we are living with the great scourge of street
violence. Even the murder of one of our neighbors is a tragedy, but in
the East Bay this tragedy is multiplied week after week. At the beginning
of this New Year, all of us must ask how we can be instruments of peace.
First, we must pray. This spirit of violence that seems to have us so
powerfully in its grip is one of those demons “that,” as the
Lord says, “can only be cast out by prayer” (Mk. 9:29). We
need God’s own help to win this struggle.
So, please resolve to pray every day for an end to the killing. Even if
one lives in a safe neighborhood, a Christian cannot give into the temptation
of thinking that this is not my problem. What happens to one of Christ’s
least happens to him.
I invite you especially to pray the rosary for peace in our neighborhoods.
Our Lady of Fatima called for just such prayers for peace. In our own
time that prayer bore fruit in the liberation of millions of people from
the yoke of political tyranny. Once more this prayer can be a force for
freedom, for setting us free from violence in our streets.
And to our prayer we must add the resolution to do the deeds of peace
which the Holy Spirit inspires in our hearts. There are groups we can
join, coalitions we can be part of, efforts we can undertake to face down
the demon of violence.
If you want more information about what you can do, a good place to start
is by contacting Catholic Charities of the East Bay to ask about their
Youth Community Violence Prevention Program (www.cceb.org/programs.php
or 510-768-3139.)
Before I move on to my final topic, I want to ask, in particular, that
you make a special mention in your prayers of all those who bear the pain
that comes from the murder of a loved one. At the top of that list has
to be the parents and spouses and children of victims.
Pray, too, for the priests, along with their co-workers in the ministry,
who accompany the survivors on the sad path that leads from death to burial,
and then on into the days of mourning that follow.
Finally, I want to draw your attention to one of the great graces which
we expect 2008 will hold for us: the grace of the dedication of our new
Cathedral of Christ the Light. As we’ve announced, the date for
the dedication is Sept. 25.
And there will be many events through a whole Year of Jubilee to help
us make this an occasion to rededicate ourselves — the family of
faith, for whom the Cathedral will be a home — to our service of
sharing and spreading the Light of Christ.
The important matters I’ve written about above — our call
to live in hope, and our mission as peacemakers — are inseparably
connected to our new cathedral. By drawing us together in this temple,
the beauty of which witnesses powerfully to the presence of the good God
in our midst, we will have, by God’s grace, new energy to fulfill
the call we received at Baptism, when the priest or deacon said: “Receive
the light of Christ.”
In this, Christ was addressing to us in person the charge that we must
let our light shine before all (Mt. 5:14-16). For this, too, I thank God
ahead of time: for all the good he will gather together at our cathedral
and its campus, for all the fruit that will be brought forth in our diocese
and our communities because we have launched out into the deep (Lk. 5:4)
in building this new center from which we can advance the New Evangelization
of the Third Millennium.
Previous "In His Light" Columns by Bishop Allen H. Vigneron
