From our Pastor’s Desk

Dear Family:

We have journeyed through the weeks of Advent — a season of hope, repentance, and joyful expectation. Today, on this Fourth Sunday of Advent, the Church invites us to pause and contemplate the nearness of the Lord. The candles on our Advent wreath are almost all burning, reminding us that the Light of the World is about to break into our darkness.

On this Sunday of Advent, the mood of the liturgy shifts from the intense calls to conversion to a focus on the events immediately surrounding the birth of Jesus. All the readings from the prophets, the apostles, and the gospels cluster around the mystery announced to Mary by the Angel Gabriel and the Holy Family of Nazareth. The Holy Spirit is powerfully at work in the Church now as he filled the womb of the Virgin Mary with his power.

In the first reading, the prophet Isaiah speaks in the year 734 BC when King Ahaz was facing a very powerful enemy. Isaiah urged Ahaz to have faith in the Lord’s power to deliver Jerusalem, and he offered the king a sign from the Lord. When the king hypocritically refused, Isaiah angrily proclaimed that a sign would be given him anyway, the sign of a virgin with a child whose name shall be called Emmanuel, which means “God with us.” God is with his people in the midst of their powerful enemies.

In the gospel, we hear that before Mary and Joseph came together, Mary is found to be with child by the Holy Spirit. It is clear that the child is not Joseph’s, but rather God’s own Son. St. Matthew draws our attention to Joseph, a man of deep faith and quiet strength. Faced with a situation he could not fully understand — Mary’s unexpected pregnancy — Joseph chose the path of mercy over judgment. His willingness to listen to God’s voice in a dream and to take Mary as his wife shows us what it means to trust in God’s plan, even when it disrupts our own.

Both in the first reading and in the gospel, we hear the name Emmanuel, “God with us.” Again, God is with Joseph in the midst of a great mission to watch and raise the mother and Son of God.

As we stand on the threshold of Christmas, the message is clear: Like Joseph, we are called to listen for God’s voice, even in unexpected ways. Like Mary, we are invited to say “yes” to God’s plan, trusting that His ways are higher than ours. Like the prophets, we are to announce hope to a world that often feels weary and afraid. This final week of Advent is not just about preparing our homes for celebration, but preparing our hearts for encounter. Emmanuel — God with us — comes to dwell not in perfect circumstances, but in open hearts.

In the next days we will celebrate these mysteries in which “God is with us.” We need God among us as the sign of God’s love and salvation for us. Often we find ourselves like King Ahaz in front of a big enemy such as vice, sin, sickness, conflict, and precariousness, and we need a sign from God. Sometimes we may find ourselves like Joseph in front of a mystery in our lives, in front of an event that goes beyond our power to understand it. In all these moments, we need the intervention of God to tell us that He is with us as the prophet Isaiah did with Ahaz or the angel to Joseph. We can create a space and time during this Christmas season to meditate on God’s love and salvation for us from our powerful enemies, the devil and his works. Joseph listened to the voice of God in his dream with the angel and he obeyed him, welcoming Mary our mother with her Son Jesus into his home. Mary also meditated on all these events and kept them in her heart. Let us also welcome the holy family of Nazareth into our hearts and homes so that we may not be afraid to face our enemies and difficulties at the threshold of this New Year.

What we are preparing to celebrate at Christmas is the enthronement of righteousness, justice and peace on earth. We need humility and detachment to accept the peace that Christ brings. Today’s second reading says it comes through obedience of faith. We cannot but emulate the humility of Joseph who decided to take the wise counsel of the angel of God through his dream and bring peace to the home of Nazareth. Our world is becoming too ambitiously arrogant and our prayer styles are becoming too tempestuously noisy. And, ipso facto, hearing the Word of God is becoming more and more difficult. We emulate also the purity of Mary that gave righteousness to the human race. In the story of the Messiah we celebrate the role of dream as a means through which God spoke to men and the virtue of purity as a tool which God values most in women. These two instruments of divine – human encounter has been bastardized by the noise and corruption of the modern day.

As we approach the Nativity of our Lord, like St. Joseph, are we open to God’s plans? Are we willing to listen, reflect, and carry out what He wants from each of us? Are we entirely at God’s disposal, in so far as doing what He wants from us in every moment of our lives? Am I doing what God wants from me right now? Am I docile to God’s insinuations in my soul?

A Christian who really seeks to follow Christ must steadily strive to seek and do God’s will, overcoming our love of comfort, tiredness, and selfishness, for this is what Jesus Himself did, thereby giving us a clear path to follow: “My food is to do the will of the one who sent me and to finish his work” (Jn 4:34). Let us not forget that this is the key to open the door and enter the kingdom of heaven.

But the question arises: how do I come to know God’s will? God’s will is very simple: He wants us all next to Him in Heaven; He wants us all expending eternity with Him at His Heavenly Home. This means that we need to utilize the Sacraments: Baptism, Confession, Communion, Confirmation, Anointing of the Sick, Marriage to those entering into marriage and Holy Orders to those entering into a religious life. But above all, it means we need to have a personal relationship with God through His only begotten Son, our Lord Jesus Christ.

In one of the many conversations Our Lord had with St. Faustina, He said: “When you reflect upon what I tell you in the depths of your heart, you profit more than if you had read many books. Oh, if souls would only want to listen to My voice when I am speaking in the depths of their hearts, they would reach the peak of holiness in a short time (St. Faustina, Diary of Divine Mercy in my Soul, n. 584).” We could easily turn deaf to what God wants from us and unfortunately, we lose the great opportunity to carry out what is good, not only for us, but for a lot of people. May the example of Joseph and Mary makes us One Body, One Spirit, One Family!

Blessed Virgin Mary, Saint Katharine Drexel, Saint Michael the Archangel, St. José Gregorio Hernández, Pope Saint Pius X, St. Teresa of Avila, and St. Charbel, pray for us.

Yours in Christ Jesus!
Fr. Omar