Even without photographs, I can still see my grandmother’s Christmas tree.  The image is enfolded in a peaceful blanket of consolation and joy that is hard to describe.  Large colored lights on green that burn and blur in calmness as my heart’s eye watches them.  I know that others share this type of what some may call sentimentality.  It is very real though, and not just within the context of youthful innocence of years gone past.  The memory is both small and large.  Seemingly small because it’s a moment that seems isolated and perhaps insulated by the past, confounding in its simplicity when drawn up against the contrived busyness of “adult” life.  However, it is quite large and significant, when I allow it to speak to me now, and not just as a melancholy memory, but one that can be as meaningful and relevant today, so long as it opens me up!  As long as I accept the “greeting” as it is truly meant to be heard.

Small towns of Judah figure prominently in today’s readings.  From the prophet Micah (MI 5: 1-4A), we hear how insignificant the small town of Bethlehem seems in the “grand” scheme of things.  And yet, as we know, this becomes ground zero for the Incarnation.  And in Luke’s Gospel (LK 1:39-45), we have the young Mary hurrying into the countryside of Judah to visit her older cousin, to celebrate the anticipation of new life together!  It’s a small encounter, but it’s also very big.  The simple greeting that Mary bids Elizabeth radiates throughout the older cousin’s body so much so, that the growing life within her leaps for joy within her womb!  And then Elizabeth containment fails her, when she, “filled with the Holy Spirit,” cries out in a loud voice,

“Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And how does this happen to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For at the moment the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the infant in my womb leaped for joy. Blessed are you who believed that what was spoken to you by the Lord would be fulfilled.”

There is such truth in simplicity, yet we seem to always seek stimulation in one shape of form.  Simple relationships honored and revered grant such grace.  We forget how to let the Christmas lights mesmerize us in just their being, bright and glowing.

My prayer is that we can accept the “greeting” of Hope and Joy that is always beaconing to us, by perhaps fine-tuning our senses to that awareness!  And in this awakening, we can be caught off guard by this “Force” and spontaneously respond in Trust.

I believe there is no barrenness that cannot bear fruit, nothing too small and seemingly insignificant, and no age too young or too old to experience the spontaneous joy of New Life’s promise of real Peace!

Thomas