01.03.2021 Homily

The scripture readings that the church puts before us during the Christmas season are so full, so full with overlaying themes that all one can do is to take one or other of those themes and reflect upon it. I suggest that this feast is about the hunger of the human heart. It's about the restlessness of the human spirit. It's about the search.

These people from the East, they searched everywhere for the child who would redeem them, roving like pilgrims, journeying from afar, in every kind of danger. This day is the feast day of all who seek God through life in pilgrimage, the journey of those who find God because they seek God.

When we read the story of the Magi, we in a sense are reading our own story, the history of our own pilgrimage. Led by a star that came from far-off Persia, they struggled through deserts. They successfully questioned their way through indifference and politics until they found the child and could worship Him as their savior King.

 

Our journey's path moves through childhood, through young adulthood, through maturity. Our journey's path moves through festive days and many routine days. It moves through success and through misery, through virtue and through sin, through love and through disillusionment. On and on and on our journey goes, irresistibly from the morning of birth to the evening of death. Like you, I journey in search of my center, my true self, my identity, my deepest truth. I search for eternal life. I journey in the search of God, that in the human face of Jesus, I might meet the creator God, and that in the human face of Jesus, I might discover who I am, when the savior King comes to reveal both who God is and who I am.

Every human being is on that journey. Every human being is at the center a restless person. It is what ultimately, beneath all doubt and confusion and wonder that fills our lives, this restlessness, and that restlessness ends, ultimately, when we come into the presence of God. This revelation of the truth does not come about because I wait for it or I long for it. This goal demands an investment. The Magi had to undertake the search relentlessly, amid the challenge and disappointment. They had to focus on the star. They had to commit to the journey. Now the same is true of you and me. We also must commit. The lifelong commitment. We must undertake the search.