What would our lives be like without Jesus?

The Season of Advent invites us to keep in our hearts that time before the Coming of the Lord in His profound love in the Incarnation. We are called in today’s liturgy to feel deeply the desire for Jesus to come to us.

In the epistle, St. Paul urges us to cast off the deeds of darkness and to put on the armor of light. He is teaching us that, up until now, we have very much been living as if Jesus had not yet come to our souls. In our sins, we have lived in the darkness that is separate from the Light of Christ. When Jesus comes to our souls by grace – and it is this coming of the Lord for which we long daily – He shines His saving Light into every part of our soul and He fills us with the joy of possessing Him in divine love.

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On this final Sunday of the liturgical year, the Church turns her mind and heart to the contemplation of the end of the world. Here she accepts the teaching of Jesus that the world as we know it is passing away, that here we have no lasting city, but seek a home that is yet to come. She confesses her faith in the Last One, Who is the Lord of the Last Things, Who will come again to our earth.

At His Second Coming, our Gospel today teaches us, the Lord will come openly and in glory, with the sign of His Cross in the sky for all to behold. He will come again not in the weakness and poverty of His Sacred Nativity in the manger of Bethlehem, but in the regal victory of His Resurrection and Ascension. He will come not to save us – He has done that already – but to judge us, consummating His beautiful work of salvation. In His First Coming, He came to sow; at the end of time, He comes to gather.

We have a tendency to fear the Second Coming of Jesus. For one, we know our sinfulness and how unworthy in ourselves we are of His Mercy. For another, we are attached to the pleasures of this life and wish not to lose them. The conquering of these fears is the blessed work of Jesus’s coming into our hearts by grace, which applies to us the salvation He won for us in His First Coming, so that we can be eager for His Second Coming.

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Tomorrow is the feast day of a very important saint, who is not nearly as well-known as she should be. St. Gertrude the Great, a German Benedictine mystic of the 13th century, has drawn the admiration and love of many saints throughout the ages. She was especially beloved by St. Teresa of Avila and St. Francis DeSales, and the great re-founder of French Benedictine monasticism, Venerable Prosper Gueranger, wrote extensively and effusively in praise of her.

Gertrude entered monastic life in her native land at the age of five as a student and persevered in her consecration through years of suffering and depression. She was very intelligent and excelled in her studies. At the age of 26, she had a profound conversion experience in which Jesus revealed His Heart to her. After this, she abandoned all pursuit of created goods and sought with her whole heart to please God alone. She abandoned her study of the profane sciences to focus exclusively on theology, and “from being a grammarian became a theologian,” as her biographer put it.

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Today, November 9, the Church celebrates the Dedication of the Lateran Basilica, the cathedral church of the Bishop of Rome. This beautiful temple of the Eternal City, being the Pope’s cathedral, is the Church’s only “archbasilica” and is given the honorific title of “Mother and Head of all churches.”

The celebration of the dedication of a church allows us to meditate on the importance of beautiful churches. The beauty of a church building is meant to reflect the beauty of the Church herself, which is made beautiful especially by the holiness of her Saints. This is an important meditation for us especially as we reflect on the Last Things. We are called to be beautiful in the glory of the Resurrection!

The church building is a marvelous temple consecrated to God, just as a saint is a temple of the Holy Spirit in his soul and in his body. When we celebrate the dedication of a church, we are reminded of this truth of our faith: that each of us is called to be as beautiful as even the Lateran Basilica in our wholehearted love for God and neighbor. In truth, the soul and body of a saint are even more the temple of God, and reflect even more His Beauty, than the most beautiful of church buildings!

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