Second Sunday of Advent. Painting by: Ronald Raab, CSC 2017

Dear Followers of the Christ,

We proclaim the gospel from the beginning today, Mark 1:1-8. We hear on this Second Sunday of Advent urgency from John the Baptist, to prepare a path for Christ Jesus. John is not suited to untie the sandal strap of Jesus, yet his voice echoes down the generations to help us prepare our hearts for his coming again.

Advent unsettles us. It is designed to help us untie the bonds of our earthly desires and help us focus on the real message of Christ Jesus in his second coming at the end of time. Our temptation in the Advent season is to domesticate this message. We can’t tame John or Christ’s desire for us, to save his people. We are so used to making Advent a time of serene nostalgia or sappy sentimentality. Advent is a radical grace that pierces through our stubborn ways and ignites a vigor and hope for our own lives and the world. Advent gets us off the couch and into the world bearing within our lives a new way of seeing our salvation.

We do not hear in these beginning weeks of Advent about waiting for a baby to be born or to build a cozy fire and sip eggnog. Instead, we are to witness how the world is in need of such a hope that frees people from injustice, war, violence and hunger. Advent rouses within the hearts of the faithful a time to reach down within our own convictions and live a more authentic life.

Advent shakes us out of our complacency. The texts and scriptures are meant to help us let go our earthly attachments, our addictions to violence, hatred and shootings, our inner addictions to drugs and our convictions that we always possesses the correct answers even to the most complicated answers. What we are waiting for is a radical conversion to hope, love and harmony among every people and nation. This begins with us holding up to the Light of Christ the darkness we possess within our lives, the lack of faith we have, and the hope that we can surrender all earthly life into the glory of God’s eternal presence.

We hear from Isaiah, the paradoxes that we face and the hope for our world when faith makes a home within us. Every valley shall be filled in, every mountain will be made low and the rugged land will be made plain. We hold within our lives the potential to change the world when faith is restored within our hearts and hope is lived every day, no matter the obstacles or barriers. As Isaiah says, “Then the glory of the LORD shall be revealed.”

I encourage you to take stock of your life in this holy season. Ponder again, the salvation and love you wish to possess from God and reflect on how you will live this wonder well beyond the Christmas Season.

Blessings to you in these Advent days,

Fr. Ron

From Give Us This Day, published by Liturgical Press for December 7, 2017

The Paradox and the Promise

When I proclaim the Advent Gospels during Mass, I hold on to the book for dear life. I do so because I am profoundly aware of the paradoxes and precarious paths the Gospels take us in this unique season of longing. The Word is rock and surety. However, we all must become vulnerable as infants and trusting as apprentices in these Advent days.

As I open my mouth to fill the Church with the Holy Word, I witness the widower sitting alone in the front pew months after his wife’s death. With his cane at his side, he aches for a sure-footed future for his children and grandchildren. I see a wide-shouldered, high school hero who wept uncontrollably at his mother’s funeral last week. I notice a recently sober woman, heavy red lipstick covering her quivering lips. Her tears reveal her search for Jesus in her newly found humility.

Advent reveals our search for Jesus. We all receive the Word, sometimes with deflecting hearts and hardened attitudes. Jesus invites us to be humble enough to accept the rock-like nature of love, forgiveness, and peace. This is the promise of Jesus, the paradox that forms our lives. We are to become humble believers in Advent. When we follow out of our need and longing, we are certain to find our way to the manger again, where hope for our lives becomes a sure thing.

Fr. Ronald Raab

Ronald Patrick Raab, CSC, is pastor of the Tri-Community Catholic Parish in Colorado Springs. He formerly served as associate pastor at Saint Andre Bessette Church in Old Town, Portland, Oregon. Learn more at http://www.ronaldraab.com.

Reflection based on today’s scriptures for the First Sunday of Advent, 2017

Advent charms our restlessness

Challenging us to begin again

As breathless clay in the hands of a potter

An apocalyptic summons to calm our volatile egos

To rest in the mud and miracle of creation

Watch and wait

In all that is not perfectly whole or loved or finished

Tangled half-truths and corrupted injustice

For a new presence of divine peace

Spaces in our darkened world where light

Shall reflect the beauty of our Creator’s imagination

This year I wait for Jesus among mangled hope

Walking amid shattered glass from boarded up store fronts

Stepping over cardboard huts along the street

Leaning up against the survivors of hurricanes and fires

Watching for tenderness not blame

With all my heart I believe

Jesus will be born in Puerto Rico this year

Amid dark-outs and lack of fresh water

Hidden in the empty schoolhouses

Seeking shelter under the rumble of roofless homes

Jesus will be born somewhere in the sex scandals

Where relationships of power finally give way

To humble awareness that we cannot control or demean people

Somewhere deflated egos will make a home for real love

Jesus will be born in vast divides this year

In inflamed discussions about hospitality of immigrants

Or buried in the concrete pilings of border crossing walls

He will paint red and blue into a hue of hope

For skin shades of brown and white and black

Jesus will be born this year along the freeway of human trafficking

Where our journeys will lead us into caring for our children

Jesus will be born this year in the controversies of guns

As we grieve innocent people from unimaginable violence

Jesus will be born among our leaders and bishops and among the hopeless

Holding together the challenges and paradoxes and arguments

Whether or not love should be our most valuable friend

Where hope is dried under the nails of the potter’s hands

On the Margins from Mater Dei Radio, Portland, OR

First Sunday of Advent, December 3, 2017

LISTEN NOW: CLICK HERE

Gospel   MK 13:33-37

Mothering AIDS: Snippets from my encounters and conversations with mothers who stood by the suffering of their sons in the complexities of AIDS in the first twenty years of my priesthood. I wrote this poem recently as the first in a series. 

 At the screen door

We meet at the dirty screen door

Her face in shadow

Her fragile hand reaches for the loose doorknob from the inside

She seems taller because I stand a step down on the front porch

Sweat dripping down my back from the summer sun and

Nerves because another mother

Invites me over the threshold to sit aside a son’s deathbed

Still desiring the best for him

The priest’s last call

The pills exhausted and the chemo done

The oil is on the thumb of the man who

Opens the door to heaven within her heart at least

From her whispering invitation I slowly

Creep the narrow bedroom path amid silent machines

Strangers in this quiet room creating more fear than remedy

I open up my prayers and my heart in the darkened space

His empty eyes look through me

I sing a lullaby of faith

My heart resting in his

Connecting his silence and his song of unspoken truth

Feeling the eternal shore wash up against his bed

I touch him

Laying my hand on his forehead bearing open sores

With oil and prayer deeper than the silence

Blessing him in his fear that I will condemn him

More distracting than the pain beating against his breath

His worry that no holy man would touch his truth

The real man

His mother and I give him away and birth him again

We amble back to the threshold

She tells me I am the only person to touch her dying son

She rests those grateful words and her face on my chest

Then pushes open the worn out screen door

Toward the warm light

Click here: LEARN MORE about World AIDS Day

“Waiting for the Light” Painting: Ronald Raab, CSC

Dear Brothers and Sisters of the Messiah,

Why does Advent begin with such a challenging call from Mark’s gospel, “Be watchful! Be Alert!” We begin with a call to cultivate a deep desire for God. This desire today will help us celebrate Christmas, the Incarnation of God. This desire for God is richly traditional and ever new.

Take a look around our world today. We face so many issues that divide us, both within the Church and in the world around us. We discover our call and challenge to watch and wake up from the very issues that need our attention. God calls us into union and communion. This means that nothing within our lives is separate from God. God wants us to raise a fuss about how we live with disunity and hardness of heart.

We take seriously the value of all human life because God surrendered to us. Jesus was born in humbleness and insecurity. Image that. The All-Knowing, All-Powerful God, the God of All the Universe, broke open the heavens to manifest love upon the earth, being born along the margins of his culture. It is our challenge then to make sure we support the dignity of all human beings no matter their culture, where they have immigrated from or what language their children speak. We support with the basics of life, food, shelter, love and mercy, because those are the very things that Jesus did not have when he came among us!

In the sacred liturgy, we start the story of Jesus all over again. This means we start with the longing of the people of Israel for the Messiah. We start with the longing of our own hearts. Let me say that there are three aspects of this longing. We place ourselves in the PAST because of the history of salvation, being united with the longing of our ancestors. We also long for the FUTURE because we await the final return of Jesus Christ in the end of time. We also long for the PRESENT moment in which God changes our hearts and the hearts of the people of the world. This last longing or waiting for God is the most difficult. It is not easy for us to take a step back from our prejudice, our political views and our obsessive nature about always being correct, and confront the reality of our humble nature and to place our lives in God alone. This is the role of our individual prayer and our communal prayer. Our lives are waiting and longing for the Mystery of God manifest in our decisions, choices and family lives.

We need to be a watchful people. That means we need to have one eye on the world’s poverty, injustice and dissatisfaction, turmoil and hopelessness and one eye open waiting for God to come to us and change our hearts and satisfy our needs. Advent begins the deep longing within our hearts for the conversion of our lives and of the Church. Advent does not begin with just sentiment and nostalgia, but a new awareness of our relationship with Jesus Christ.

Blessings in these Advent days,

Fr. Ron

“Christ the King” A drip painting by: Ronald Raab, CSC 2017

A poem as question from Christ the King: “Am I expecting too much?”

Am I expecting too much that you would step into the unknown and search for me not in palaces and places of your own building up but in the way I call you into letting go and go down into a place where you can finally see other people for who they truly are across tables sharing watery oatmeal and old coffee or even at a countertop where you speak on the phone to another human being behind glass where he is wearing orange or even a place where a stranger who has crossed a desert of chemotherapy or on the hard soil of grief from the tragedy of losing a daughter who was traveling home for the holidays in a car wreck whose mouth is so dry that words of thanks can hardly make it through his parched lips but just needs a glass of water from you because there is so much standing in the way but if you listen really closely words will flow from the bottom of the glass and connect you in ways you can’t even imagine because love is a lot like water it can flow from your heart if you just share it and others will drink it up or perhaps if you share your winter coat with a mother who survived the shelter three months after the flood and she is finally going home and has spent her money on clothing for her children but she is cold not because her children do not love and respect her after her husband ran off with someone else but because she is just too loving to use the money to put a coat over her own broad and daring shoulders or perhaps can you offer your heart into the real place of hospitality and welcome to the foster family down the block where you have heard but never have experienced that the reason the children were there in the first place was because their birth parents were heroin addicts and the mother was only fifteen because she left her parents when she was just reaching puberty because she was abused and pushed into a closet with no door knob on the inside accept that she finally reached out one day to someone who came to the door of the house and who reached out to her like a new handle of hope and so you must know that there are stories behind the stories and more stories and your hospitality can create a new story if somehow you let go of your pride and ambition and there will be sheep and goats in the end but the one thing that will last is the love I have for you all so don’t be surprised that the least among you just might teach you that I am truly the Christ and that all things will be one in me when finally I take your breath away and in the end I will be your King and master of love for all your hardness and discouragement and even your joy and hope will live and that you will finally find a home in me and that maybe all the things I promise you in the end you will finally understand that the end begins today?

“Christ the King” Painting by: Ronald Raab, CSC 2017

Dear Followers of Christ the King,

Today marks the conclusion of our liturgical year with the Solemnity of Christ the King. This feast draws us into the reality that all things will be one in Christ Jesus in the end. All things will be in Christ Jesus. All things, including violence and racism, including doubt and hopelessness, including greed and substance abuse will all be healed and loved in Christ the King.

The Solemnity of Christ the King means a great deal to me. I cling to the notion that all things will be healed, loved and forgiven in the end. As a priest and pastoral minister, I hold on to this for dear life. The gospel today helps us understand the real meaning of the Solemnity.

Matthew 25:31-46 is one of the most important salvation texts in the gospels. Our salvation rests in giving a thirsty person a drink and a naked man some clothing. Our hope for heaven means that we visited the prisoner and cared for people who are ill. Being at the right hand of the Father begins with us on earth claiming our responsibility for feeding people food and sitting with strangers with an attentive ear and a heart full of hope.

If you read only one gospel text this year, read this one at its conclusion. Our salvation begins with us doing simple things for others. Salvation is not passing an exam on the Catechism or based on attendance records from Mass. Even confession is not on this list to get into heaven.

What is on the list to enter salvation is that we care for people. What a surprise. Salvation is not only a personal experience but also a communal reality. We find our way to Jesus’ face because we showed up to the real human faces of people in need. We showed up to help others without judgment, condemnation or ridicule. We showed up to relieve people of their burdens because we are already one in Christ Jesus.

So as we end our liturgical year and begin a new year next week on the First Sunday of Advent, let’s remind ourselves that salvation rests on our conscience to befriend the least among us, not the powerful and the glitzy, but the worn out, the tired and the smelly. Salvation comes in ways in which we least expect. Tell everyone you know that all will be well in Christ Jesus, King of the Universe.

Some thoughts for the week:

Take some time and reflect on what it means for Christ to come in glory…

Reflect on what it means to see Jesus Christ in the fragile and ill…

Talk with your family about the fact that salvation comes from befriending the marginalized…

Pray for the broken, lost and uncertain as we celebrate Christ the King…

Find your way to the face of Jesus, the King of the Universe in your prayer this week…

Blessings,

Fr. Ron

On the Margins from Mater Dei Radio, Portland, OR

Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe

Sunday November 26, 2017

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Gospel MT 25:31-46