“May the Lord bless you and keep you. May the Lord let His face shine on
  you and be gracious to you. May the Lord uncover  His face to you and
bring you peace.” —Num. 6:22

I had a priest friend, an out-going, hearty, friendly, bear of a man. He taught. Every Christmas break he would serve as a chaplain on some cruise ship to the Caribbean. Travel company and tourists loved him. He took a bit of drubbing from his brothers over the particular style of his ministry, but he would hold his ground, said he did a lot of good.

One trip he heard of a Jewish couple who were celebrating their silver wedding anniversary, so he got out his Hebrew scripture and learned the blessing by heart. In Hebrew. Of course, the couple were deeply moved at the little ceremony. Who wouldn’t be? In the original Hebrew.

“May the Lord bless you. May the Lord let His face
   shine on you and bring you peace.”

I cannot do it for you in Hebrew. But I do it. For it is your jubilee. I mean, New Year’s Day. The end of one year, the start of another. The one we will never see again, the other we’ve never seen before. And how many times for you?  Past?  And to come?

It’s multi-faceted, multi-layered, this feast. Octave of Christmas. Mother of God. End of the old year. Start of the new. It’s the circumcision, a Jewish rite. It’s a Christian feast. It’s a secular one. As so many cards say: “Season’s Greetings.”  “Health and Happiness for the New Year.”

For our part, we can be very explicit, out loud: for God, for Jesus, for Mary, for Joseph. For the Old Law and the New. For the chosen and those grafted onto the chosen. A new year.

Fr. Paschal was here last year. And Br. Giles. And Br. Joseph. They are now what they were born for. Where they were destined to be when God created them.

“When your (brother) writes a letter of good-bye,
It’s no secret you’ll feel better if you cry.”

It is so wonderful a thing to love life and yet in the loving know that it is a rehearsal for the real thing to come. A dress rehearsal, indeed, the final rehearsal, for the real thing is tomorrow night.

People say that you cannot live like that: one foot here, one there, today with an eye on tomorrow. Yes, you can. You put your heart into today because it colors and qualifies your tomorrow.

Contrarily, you rob this life of its inner meaning when you rob it of its eternal significance. Then you read into it what is not there. Our immortality is not negotiable. The desires are there and the desires are for union with God forever. To dismiss your immortality means you must seek to satisfy eternal desires with what is temporal. And then in one stroke frustrate both worlds. As He said: “And for him who has, even what he has will be taken from him.”

“The Lord’s face shining on you” means the eternal dimension is part of your reality. His light embraces the beauty of this world because it reads this world in terms of the next. Then everything is more than it is, because faith reveals the scope of the human scene. Any human scene. Every human scene.

Not just silver weddings. Not just Christmas. Not just health and happiness. But the whole of it; darkness and light, sickness and health, suffering and death: the whole package.

“May the Lord bless you and keep you.
May His light shine upon you.”