Pope: allow Lord to encounter us in preparation for Christmas
(Vatican Radio) Preparing for Christmas through prayer, charity and exhaltation. With
this hope, Pope Francis called on the faithful Monday to open their hearts and allow
themselves to encounter the Lord who renews all. Tracey McClure has more…
In his homily
at the Santa Marta guesthouse on this, the first Monday of Advent, Pope Francis recalled
that as we proceed towards Christmas, we embark on a journey of faith and prayer in
preparation for our encounter with the Lord. “Because Christmas,” he said, isn’t
just a temporal celebration or the memory of a beautiful (event).”
“Christmas
is something more,” he said, “Christmas is an encounter” with the Lord. And as we
make our way towards Him, we must go with open heart and faith, even though this is
not always easy.
Speaking of today’s reading about the Roman centurion, who
with great faith begs the Lord to heal his slave, the Pope said we are like this
centurion on a pilgrimage of faith “to encounter the Lord and most of all, to allow
ourselves to be encountered by Him.”
We must allow ourselves to be encountered
by Him, the Pope repeated, to allow Him to enter us. “It is He who makes all new….Christ
renews the heart, the soul , life, hope…”
The Lord does not always say to us
what we want to hear, noted the Pope, but: He will tell me what is meant for me “because
the Lord does not look at us all together, en masse.” “He looks each one of us in
the face , in the eyes.” His is not an abstract love; "it is concrete," the Pope
said. The Lord looks at me in a personal way. And "letting ourselves be encountered
by God means just this: letting ourselves be loved by God!”