WORD 2day: 9th December, 2014

Second Tuesday of Advent

Is 40: 1-11; Mt 18: 12-14

A Shepherd in Search

The image that the readings today paint to us is of a Shepherd who is compassionately in search of his lost lamb! And more precisely the Gospel and the beginning of the first reading speak to us of the comfort that the Lord wants bring us. 

Like in the story that we hear of a little girl who was lost in a jungle. When it got dark the girl hid herself behind a bush and stayed there calm and composed. the father came in search of the girl and as soon as the girl spotted her father,she shouted "Daddy! I found you!" We sometimes think we are in search of God, while it is God who is in continuous search of us!

Advent is a time that reminds us of the God who comes in search of us. When we allow ourselves to be found, we stand to gain. When we keep ourselves away from God and hide behind blocks, we would miss graces and blessings that we would never get to understand. Let us not miss the most comforting place of all that the Lord has made ready for us: the bosom of the Shepherd who is constantly in search of us.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     

THE WORD AND THE FEAST

Immaculate Conception of our Blessed Mother

Gen 3: 9-15, 20; Eph 1: 3-6, 11-12; Lk 1: 26-38

God's Plan: Not Magic but Mystery

Today's feast is not so much to celebrate the Blessed Mother of God, as to celebrate the Eternal plan of God. God has a plan for each of us, from before the foundations of the world, reminds us the Liturgy today. At times we look at this plan as something magical and try to guess it through means of mediums and methods of all sorts: palmistry, star signs, fortune tellers and prediction professionals! God's plan is not a magic for us to manipulate; it is a mystery to be lived. God's plans unfold moment by moment, as and when we live. 

Today we see, in time immemorial the promise that God made that he will set a woman and her offspring against the evil tempter of the world. And we celebrate how this plan at the foundations of the creation, unfolded in total obscurity, in the womb which bore the womb that would bear the Son of God. What a great mystery!

It is not for us to guess God's plan or calculate God's moves: that is a radical impossibility. But we are called to believe in the God's plan, accept it and cooperate with it! God has chosen us before the foundation of the world and therefore we are not here by chance; God has willed us into existence! It is our task to discern what God's plan is for us at any particular given time and carry it out, as did our Blessed Mother all her life. 

The aspect we celebrate in our Blessed Mother today is the total cooperation that she offered to the plan of God, because of which she lived all her life, holy and blameless. Let us fix our minds on the Word today: that we are chosen before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before God in love.