Hi everyone, and welcome to Weekly Homilies with Father Mark Suslenko, Pastor of SS. Isidore and Maria Parish in Glastonbury, Connecticut. We are part of the Catholic Archdiocese of Hartford. I'm Carol Vassar, parish director of communications, and this is Episode 5 of Season 6 for the Nativity of the Lord: Dec. 25, 2022. Our Gospel reading is from Matthew, Chapter 1, verses 18-25
This is how the birth of Jesus Christ came about. When his mother Mary was betrothed to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found with child through the Holy Spirit.
Joseph her husband, since he was a righteous man, yet unwilling to expose her to shame, decided to divorce her quietly. Such was his intention when, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary your wife into your home. For it is through the Holy Spirit that this child has been conceived in her. She will bear a son and you are to name him Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.”
All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel, which means “God is with us.”
When Joseph awoke, he did as the angel of the Lord had commanded him and took his wife into his home. He had no relations with her until she bore a son, and he named him Jesus.
The Gospel of the Lord
“Becoming Undistracted” by Father Mark S. Suslenko, Pastor, SS. Isidore and Maria Parish, Glastonbury, Connecticut
If we stop and think about it, we live very busy, but also very distracted lives. It seems we're always engaged in something. One reality or another is always vying for our attention. We never seem to be quite finished with the agenda that's before us.
If you step back and you think about it a bit, how many hours in the course of a day do we find ourselves interacting with one type of device or another? Our cell phones, tablets, computers, televisions. It seems we're always being stimulated by something and we've gotten ourselves into a place, many of us, where we're almost addicted to that stimulation. We need to have this interaction in our life. There is something pleasing about the distraction. It's even gotten to the point where they've now invented blue light glasses because they've determined that looking at these screens for long periods of time can disrupt sleep and other normal human patterns.
If all of these devices to which we are exposed so often can affect us visually and mentally, what are they doing to our hearts and souls? What is happening to the interior us? Are we selling out our souls to entertain ourselves in a more physical, tangible world and thereby forgetting the deeper essence of who we are? If we buy into all of the busyness and the distraction of our life, it becomes who we are. We become our relationship with the world of technology, the various forms of social media that are before us, and the interactions in that sphere that we have with those we know and those we don't know. And it convinces us of an illusion, and it tells us that all of that stuff is what is true. That my success and my value as a person is found in my ability to negotiate all those things. It can consume us.
You know, gone are the days for those of us who are a bit older when we had the rotary telephones or the push dial telephone, you could literally take the receiver off the hook, unplug it from the wall. So when somebody tried calling you, if you didn't want to be disturbed, they would just get a busy signal, and it would be their responsibility to try again later. And that's how we organized and lived life.
Today it's hard to unplug, and you can't really shut it down. When you send somebody an email that goes through whether they want to receive it or not. You can't put a do not disturb flag where emails are sent back with a busy signal. And so in this world in which we're constantly bombarded by all kinds of stimulus that we very often cannot shut off, that is there, it begins to have a life of its own. Even if we distance ourselves from it, it's still there. If we say we're not going to engage in it for a day, a week, when we finally do flip that switch back on, the train falls before us, and we still have to deal with it at that time.
Where does that all bring us as human beings?
It's an illusion of life that we are creating, and it's not real. At least not real in the sense of who we truly are. Because if we're so busy and our minds are so engaged and we're dealing with all of this stuff of life, no matter what it is, even the amount of time we spend gaming, when do we begin to step back, relax a little bit, and ask the deeper questions about life itself?
Who am I? Who is God? What's really important, and what's the meaning of life? These big theological and philosophical questions can't be found in an iPad, a phone, on the internet, or on social media. They have to be wrestled with in our hearts and souls.
And so we gather here today because, on some level in our lives, something is piquing our interest tonight in something God did thousands of years ago. In the birth of his son, God is giving us a reminder, a gentle one, an ordinary one, even a quiet one, about who we are and who He is, and what life is really all about. It's an opportunity for us to stop and focus a bit, to detach ourselves from all the busyness and distraction, and even if for only a few minutes, ask those bigger questions about who we are.
Tonight's mystery of Christ's birth leads us to the three essential gifts that God also gives us, and they can't be found on the internet, and they can't be found anywhere but here. And they are faith, hope, and love. And at some point in our lives, as we find ourselves journeying through all that life brings us, we're gonna find ourselves needing those three gifts. We're going to be looking for them, and we're not going to necessarily find them if we haven't cultivated them within and taken that leap to do so. And so God invites us tonight on that journey, a journey to faith, a journey to hope, and a journey into love and the truth about who we are and who God is.
Father Mark Suslenko is the pastor of SS. Isidore and Maria Parish in Glastonbury, Connecticut. Learn more about our parish community at www.isidoreandmaria.org. And follow us on social media: Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Our music comes free of charge from Blue Dot Sessions in Fall River, Massachusetts. I’m Carol Vassar. Thanks for joining us.