Daily Reflection Memorial of St. Lucy, Virgin and Martyr

During Advent we read that God summons the prophet Isaiah to comfort the desolate people. Yes, God gives us hope. Yet this is not a driven, competitive yearning for advancement, wealth, and honors. Instead, we are liberated by our God who encourages us to foster healthy interpersonal relationships. “They that hope in the Lord will renew their strength.” We place our hope in people, not in things. Whenever we hope in people, we make their burden light.

    We can mire ourselves in political, cultural, and international wars. Such a decision leads to despair. Isaiah reminds us again that we have a God of hope. Instead of placing our expectations in the stock market, power ball winnings, or wishful thinking, let us remember again that we have a God of hope. Following our longing is alive and vibrant if we allow our hearts to be moved by Jesus’ words in today’s gospel reading: “Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, I will give you rest.” When we don’t allow ourselves to get in the way of the Divine, God pardons, heals, redeems, and crowns us with mercy. Yes, God is Hope!

    We need to support each other in hope. In her book, Almost Everything—Notes on Hope, contemporary writer Anne Lamott describes living hope in the here and now. “We have to make ourselves available to one another, or we can’t experience goodness. It’s not so much us seeking God, tracking Her down with a butterfly net; it’s agreeing to be found. The Old Girl reaches out to everyone and wants to include us in the beautiful, weird, sometimes anguished life. All people: go figure. These days are the hardest we will ever live through. The wind is blowing, but because we are together in this, we have hope. Most days. Maybe more than ever before in my lifetime my friends and I are aware of our brokenness and the deep crazy, the desperations for light, hope, food, and medicine for the poor. What helps is that we are not all crazy and hopeless on the same day. One of us remembers and reminds the rest of us that when it is really dark, you can see the stars. We believe that grace is stronger than evil and sin. We believe that love is stronger than hate, that the Divine is bigger than all huge egos simmered together in a bloviation stew, and this makes us laugh. And laughter is hope. We believe and hope that we will get through these terrifying times.”

    Today we are also celebrating the feast of St. Lucy. Much of what we know about her is legend. However, we do know that her commitment to God was so deep that she forfeited her own life in martyrdom rather than deny her Beloved.

Often, we also are faced with decisions that test our faith, our principles of life. We may not be asked to give up our lives, but we are asked to make decisions based on the integrity of our faith. Let us marinate in the faith, hope, and love we have received in Baptism, so that we can be conduits of hope to those we contact each day.