Spiritual retreat at St Teresa's Church, Kowloon, Hong Kong
November 24, 2024
Several people have asked me to share this text, which can be useful to be less unprepared to celebrate Advent and the upcoming Jubilee. In the text you will find some numbered and italicized titles: these are slide captions, projected during the retreat, just to comment the words, like a Power Point presentation. Unfortunately, I am not able to insert all the images on this website.
1.2. Advent wreath
The time of Advent is the period preceding Christmas. In this period, 4 weeks, the Church helps us to focus on the coming of Jesus. Advent comes for a Latin word that means “coming”.
But while we are waiting for the coming of Jesus in the manger of Bethlehem, we also wait for the coming of Jesus at the end of the world. As St Augustin says: His first coming was in poverty; His second coming will be in glory.
3. Christ in glory
Therefore, Advent is a time in which we ask ourselves: What we are waiting for? What is our hope for the future? A promotion at the office? An increase of salary? A trip to some exotic country? All these things are nice, but do not last: after a while, the joy related with them disappear. Because our desires are enormous, infinite and they are not satisfied just with these small things.
The Church says that our heart can only be satisfied by the truth, the light, the joy and love of Jesus Christ.
For this reason, during Advent we try to prepare ourselves to meet Jesus, to know Him more, to discover Him.
4. Sinking with gifts
It is a useless pity to prepare so many things for Christmas (food, gifts, lights, tree, crib…) but we do not prepare our heart and mind to meet Jesus.
It is like to celebrate a feast for the birthday of our friend, but when he arrives, we don’t look at him, we do not embrace him, we do not spend time with him.
The Jubilee
5. Pope Francis announces the Jubilee
This year we are receiving a special gift to live deeply this Advent: on Christmas Eve, pope Francis will inaugurate the Jubilee, opening the Holy Door in St Peter’s Basilica in Rome.
The Jubilee is a special time for restoring our relationship with Jesus, and with His strength transforming our life and the life of our society.
There is a very strong relationship between Advent and Jubilee: time of waiting for the coming of Jesus; time for strengthening our hope.
Let us see what pope Francis is telling us about this Jubilee.
6. Yobel
In the Old Testament, the Jubilee was a special year of return to God, of personal and social renewal.
Its name derives from “yobel”, the ram’s horn that was blown as musical instrument to announce its beginning. It involved the remission of debts, the restitution of alienated lands and the rest of the earth (cf. Lev 25,8-13). For the Jews, the return to God generated personal and social renewal.
7. Jesus at Nazareth
Jesus considers himself the herald of a new Jubilee, a “year of grace” for the liberation and joy of the world (Luke 4,16-21; cf. Is 61,1-2):
“He came to Nazareth, where he had grown up, and went according to his custom into the synagogue on the sabbath day. He stood up to read and was handed a scroll of the prophet Isaiah. He unrolled the scroll and found the passage where it was written:
'The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.'
Rolling up the scroll, he handed it back to the attendant and sat down, and the eyes of all in the synagogue looked intently at him.
He said to them, 'Today this scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing'.”
8. Jesus, the Gate
Jesus is the announcer, but above all he is the cause, the strength, the energy of this transformation of man and the world. With his love and his truth - and above all with his death and resurrection - he introduced us to a new world: dignity, tenderness, forgiveness, eternal life.
Receiving his life, following him, building a relationship with him is the condition for a full life. He is the Gate that leads into life (John 10.7-10):
“So Jesus said again, 'Amen, amen, I say to you, I am the gate for the sheep. All who came [before me] are thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not listen to them. I am the gate. Whoever enters through me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture. A thief comes only to steal and slaughter and destroy; I came so that they might have life and have it more abundantly”.
9. First Jubilee (Boniface VIII)
In the Church, the first Jubilee was launched in 1300, proposed by Pope Boniface VIII. At the beginning, the anniversary was celebrated every 100 years, then little by little it was celebrated every 25 years.
10. Jubilee 2000 (JP II)
The last ordinary Jubilee was that of the year 2000, at the beginning of the new millennium.
11. Jubilee 2015 (Francis)
But there have also been extraordinary Jubilees such as that of 2015 (Year of Mercy), desired by Pope Francis. In the letter of proclamation of this Jubilee he also announces that there will be an extraordinary Jubilee in 2033, the second millennium of the redemption obtained by the death and resurrection of Jesus.
Hope does not disappoint
12. Logo
The theme of the Jubilee 2025 is: “Hope does not disappoint” (Rom 5:5).
According to Pope Francis, there is a great desire for hope in the world: getting up in the morning, going to work, meeting friends, being interested in one thing or another… There is always the desire for something to happen, for something good to happen.
13. No hope
But in the world, there are also many disappointed hopes, or rather: many disappointments. The things or people from whom we expected something new and beautiful have given us nothing. So, we remain disappointed and often our situations worsen and become increasingly dark.
In these cases, there are only two ways out. The first is to be satisfied with very little things. Don’t make too many plans, don’t have too many desires, because nothing changes anyway; we are powerless, we cannot change society, the world… We follow what everyone else does, we follow the fashions of the moment: the lack of hope as impotence and addiction.
14. Violence
The other way out is to play a tenacious will in pursuing our projects against everything and everyone. To do this and be sure to win, we must worry only about ourselves, to the point of being ready to use violence, just to not see a dreamed future slip away. In reality, this tenacity and these worries are a way to escape the brevity of life, the fear of death: we fight to have power because we seek dignity, without which, we cannot escape from a meaningless end; we try to accumulate money to have a full life, even if it is a life full of things that after a while we get bored of; we kill because we want to escape our death transferring death on others.
15.
Zhuhai
(see what happened in Zhuhai on 11/11 night).
Stronger than death
16. Resurrection
The hope that does not disappoint must be able to give us dignity, joy and victory over death, without creating in us and around us a situation of hatred, violence, death.
The hope that does not disappoint is the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. By dying, He destroyed death, inaugurated the plenitude of life and gave us a new dignity as children loved by God, who is our Father: “Since we are justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing in the glory of God… Hope does not disappoint, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us” (Rom 5,1-2.5).
We immediately notice that Christian hope is different from merely human hopes. In these we must fight, struggle, eat bitter, up to – perhaps – obtain something in the future. The present is therefore seen as an obstacle, something to flee from, to abandon because it offers nothing good.
In Christian hope, the certainty of my and our future is based on something that is present today in my life: the fact that God’s love is poured into our hearts, that the death and resurrection of Jesus are the event that dominates today in me and in the world and that no one can vanquish.
17. Pope Francis-sick child
Pope Francis again: “Christian hope does not deceive or disappoint because it is grounded in the certainty that nothing and no one can ever separate us from God’s love: “Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril or the sword? No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom 8, 35.37-39).[SNC 3].
The source of the sacraments
Where does this love stronger than death come from? The most immediate and simple answer is: from the sacraments.
Pope Francis especially highlights two sacraments that must be rediscovered during the Jubilee: baptism and reconciliation.
18. Baptism
Regarding baptism the Pope says: “Christian hope consists precisely in this: that in facing death, which appears to be the end of everything, we have the certainty that, thanks to the grace of Christ imparted to us in Baptism, “life is changed, not ended”, forever. Buried with Christ in Baptism, we receive in his resurrection the gift of a new life that breaks down the walls of death, making it a passage to eternity…. The Jubilee… , offers us the opportunity to appreciate anew, and with immense gratitude, the gift of the new life that we have received in Baptism, a life capable of transfiguring death's drama” [SNC 20].
19. Confession
And regarding the sacrament of reconciliation, he says: “The sacrament of Penance assures us that God wipes away our sins. We experience those powerful and comforting words of the Psalm: “It is he who forgives all your guilt, who heals every one of your ills, who redeems your life from the grave, who crowns you with love and compassion… The Lord is compassion and love, slow to anger and rich in mercy… He does not treat us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our faults. For as the heavens are high above the earth, so strong is his love for those who fear him. As far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our sins” (Ps 103, 3-4.8.10-12). The sacrament of Reconciliation is not only a magnificent spiritual gift, but also a decisive, essential and fundamental step on our journey of faith. There, we allow the Lord to erase our sins, to heal our hearts, to raise us up, to embrace us and to reveal to us his tender and compassionate countenance. There is no better way to know God than to let him reconcile us to himself (cf. 2 Cor 5:20) and savor his forgiveness. Let us not neglect Confession, but rediscover the beauty of this sacrament of healing and joy, the beauty of God's forgiveness of our sins!”[SNC 23].
20. Community - Eucharist
These sacraments find immediate expression in the life of the Church. The Church is the sacrament of Christ, who with his power unites the baptized into one body, making them familiar with each other, capable of loving and forgiving each other.
Where faith, hope and charity live, “we may bear credible and attractive witness to the faith and love that dwell in our hearts; that our faith may be joyful and our charity enthusiastic; and that each of us may be able to offer a smile, a small gesture of friendship, a kind look, a ready ear, a good deed, in the knowledge that, in the Spirit of Jesus, these can become, for those who receive them, rich seeds of hope” [SNC 18].
“This experience of full forgiveness cannot fail to open our hearts and minds to the need to forgive others in turn. Forgiveness does not change the past; it cannot change what happened in the past, yet it can allow us to change the future and to live different lives, free of anger, animosity and vindictiveness. Forgiveness makes possible a brighter future, which enables us to look at the past with different eyes, now more serene, albeit still bearing the trace of past tears” [SNC 23].
Eternal life
21. Christ frees Adam and Eve
The new life that is given to us in the sacraments and in the Church sustains our hope even in death and after death. The widespread modern mentality tries not to talk about death and tries not to be interested in the possibility of a life after death: we concentrate on our work, on our earnings, on our hobbies knowing that sooner or later we will abandon everything, reluctantly or not.
Other religions dare to hope for an afterlife, even if the way they depict shows simply a difference from the life here and now, something similar to a ghost’s life: we lose our life here and now and are placed in another dimension whose consistency we do not understand. This blurred future sheds a light of fragility and emptiness on life in the present. Our participation in the death and resurrection of Christ makes us certain of life after death, of life forever. At the same time, since Christ is risen “in his true body,” the certainty of the future and his power suggest to us that our body and all that we have done in life will not be abandoned and lost, but that body will be able to live with Christ. As we say in the Creed: “I believe in the resurrection of the flesh.”
22.
Communion of Saints
For Pope Francis, the Jubilee is also an opportunity to understand that our hope goes beyond death: “I believe in life everlasting.’ So our faith professes. Christian hope finds in these words an essential foundation. For hope is ‘that theological virtue by which we desire… eternal life as our happiness.’ The Second Vatican Council says of hope that, “when people are deprived of this divine support, and lack hope in eternal life, their dignity is deeply impaired, as may so often be seen today. The problems of life and death, of guilt and suffering, remain unsolved, so that people are frequently thrown into despair.’ We, however, by virtue of the hope in which we were saved, can view the passage of time with the certainty that the history of humanity and our own individual history are not doomed to a dead end or a dark abyss, but directed to an encounter with the Lord of glory. As a result, we live our lives in expectation of his return and in the hope of living forever in him. In this spirit, we make our own the heartfelt prayer of the first Christians with which sacred Scripture ends: “Come, Lord Jesus!” (Rev 22,20). [CNS 19].
Judgment
23. Universal Judgement
The truth of the individual and final judgment belongs to eternal life and to the victory over evil, with which God makes eternal what we have done in life, for better or for worse. The Pope emphasizes that this judgment is a judgment of mercy, not like that of human tribunals [SNC 22].
24. Candles and prayers
But the evil that we have done in life needs to be purified in love. Hence the value of indulgence and prayer for the deceased [SNC 22].
“Here we begin to see the need of our prayers for all those who have ended their earthly pilgrimage, our solidarity in an intercession that is effective by virtue of the communion of the saints, and the shared bond that makes us one in Christ, the firstborn of all creation. The Jubilee indulgence, thanks to the power of prayer, is intended in a particular way for those who have gone before us, so that they may obtain full mercy” [Ibidem].
Witnesses of Hope
25. Israeli-Palestinian
In his Letter announcing the Jubilee, Pope Francis asks all the faithful to become witnesses of Christian hope in the world. The Pope also lists some special situations in which to offer signs of hope.
Among them are situations of war in which to be peacemakers [n.8] and the demographic winter, in which to support new births and young families [n.9].
Signs of hope are also necessary for prisoners [n.10], the sick [n.11], young people [n.12]: “With renewed passion – says the Pope - let us demonstrate care and concern for adolescents, students and young couples, the rising generation. Let us draw close to the young, for they are the joy and hope of the Church and of the world!”.
26. Filipino children
Signs of hope are to be offered to migrants, the elderly and the poor [nn. 13-15]. In conclusion, he states: “The coming Jubilee will thus be a Holy Year marked by the hope that does not fade, our hope in God. May it help us to recover the confident trust that we require, in the Church and in society, in our interpersonal relationships, in international relations, and in our task of promoting the dignity of all persons and respect for God's gift of creation. May the witness of believers be for our world a leaven of authentic hope, a harbinger of new heavens and a new earth (cf. 2 Pet 3, 13), where men and women will dwell in justice and harmony, in joyful expectation of the fulfillment of the Lord's promises” [SNC 25].
Our Work and the Jubilee of Hope
What does all this mean for our faith and our daily life?
For the upcoming Jubilee, I would like to propose to us some gestures:
27. Rome
-
A pilgrimage to Rome. A characteristic of the Jubilee has always been the pilgrimage (to Rome, to a basilica, to a Marian shrine, ...): a journey that is a symbol of our life and our conversion: the decision to leave and not to remain still; to walk following a direction (not to wander in a confused way); to arrive in a place where we can find rest in body and spirit, rediscovering our relationship with Christ - especially with the sacrament of reconciliation, communion and prayer - and starting a new life.
• Difference with tourism (anti-stress technique; wandering without precise destinations; just get out of the ordinary [away from it all]; not salvation, but relaxation just for oneself).
28. Hong Kong cathedral
- Pilgrimage to the cathedral to cross the Holy Door
- A gesture with the poor
- A gesture with the prisoners
29. Family with children
- A gesture with the young families with small children
30. Christmas
A few months ago, a friend of mine told me: “In our precariousness, God builds a home”. This sentence is a good commentary for Advent and Christmas.
In fact, this sentence is very true for Mary, an unknown woman from Nazareth, a girl of perhaps 13-15 years old, who became the Mother of God.
It is also true for Jesus: in the poverty of a stable, in the fragility of a Child, lives the blessing, the love of God, indeed God himself.
But it is also true for us: in the fragilities and hardships of our life, if we remain tied to Christ and to the Church, to our community, our work, even if small, bears much fruit.
Fr. Bernardo Cervellera
November 24, 2024
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