Hope and Discomfort

The Nativity of the Lord

I was invited to celebrate Christmas Eve Mass at my home parish, and, for several reasons, I decided to forego a written homily and to preach more extemporaneously. I read Pope Francis’ homily a few hours before and was moved by this quotation by the spiritual writer Alessando Pronzato, which ended up being the point on which I based my own homily:

Lord, I ask you for a little annoyance, a touch of restlessness, a twinge of regret. At Christmas, I would like to find myself dissatisfied. Happy, but not satisfied. Happy because of what you do, dissatisfied by my lack of response. Please, take away our complacency and hide a few thorns beneath the hay of our all-too-full ‘manger’. Fill us with the desire for something greater.

At the beginning of the Jubilee of Hope, the Holy Father reminds us that hope only begins with dissatisfaction and discomfort. The prospect of ‘more’ is enticing only if there is ‘not enough.’ So, he invites us to pray for a few thorns beneath our hay, to unsettle us and make us open the door to hope.

Being a Christmas homily, I set the bar low for the twice-a-year Catholics to grow in hope: pray daily, go to Mass on Sunday, make it to confession regularly. But I added a fourth challenge which, in another context where the first three could be taken for granted I would have given more attention: practice charity.

All four can and should elicit discomfort if we’re doing them right, but charity pushes more directly to the core. Here, my ‘more’ is brought face-to-face with the ‘not enough’ of another; and the point isn’t, contra the secular viewpoint, to take away the ‘not’ from my ‘not enough’ but, rather, to give me a deeper, more realistic sense of my ‘not enough’, so that my ‘not enough’ becomes my point of contact with the ‘ever more’ of God. At the same time, my new awareness of God’s ‘ever more’ is to become a sign and instrument of hope to others who rest comfortably in their ‘enough’ provoking skepticism at its claim to sufficiency.

I think it’s safe to say there is enough discomfort out there in the world today. What the world needs is what I think Pope Francis wants the Church to be: a people who live comfortably in the discomfort of the ‘not enough.’ Christian hope is grounded in a fact, the incarnation of the Son of God. Lacking that fact, discomfort inevitably ends in the conviction that nothing matters. With it, the Christian can say: Everything matters, because God has entered it. We are discomforted only because that fact has not yet been brought to completion. Our hope is that the ‘not enough’ will become, finally, ‘enough’ when all is taken up into God: “When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to him who put all things under him, that God may be everything to every one” (1 Cor. 15:28). Until then, hope is given to carry us forward. May the good Lord grant us hope in abundance.