In the sixth year of the administration of George Bush, when his brother, Jeb, was governor of Florida, Christine Gregoire was governor of Washington, and Neil Colburn, mayor of Langley, during the high priesthood of Alexander Brunett, archbishop of Seattle and Benedict XVI, the word of God came to the Amish community. Like countless other victims of tragedy in the past year, they had sustained a desert experience. A deranged truck driver stormed into a one room school house in rural Pennsylvania last October and shot ten girls, killing five of them, before turning the gun on himself.
What was even more stunning than the killing itself was the response of the Amish community. The parents of one of the murdered girls personally approached the widow of the shooter to offer their forgiveness. The self-reliant Amish insisted on establishing a fund for the killer’s wife and three children from the proceeds they received from donations to help the victims’ families. And when the shooter was buried, half of the 75 mourners in attendance were Amish.
The tragedy in Nickle Mines allowed the outside world a rare glimpse of the remarkable values of the Amish people. We tend to dismiss them as a quaint cult; one that avoids any interaction with modern technology. They isolate themselves from the consumer-centered values of mainstream America, not because they think these values are bad, but because they see them as obstacles in their search for God.
What happened at their school affected them all deeply. They love their children as much as we love ours and the deaths of these five girls devastated their families. Their hurt was great but they didn’t balance that hurt with hate. As one Amish woman said on the national news, “We can tell people about Christ and actually show you in our walk that we forgive, not just say it…”
In their uncompromising living of the Gospel values of compassion and forgiveness, the Amish community have been nothing less than prophets, inviting us, in their simple, gracious generosity of heart and spirit, to heed the message of John the Baptist, whose call to repentance we hear every year in advent as we await the coming of Christ. John challenges us to “prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths.” He urges us to make “straight” those roads made crooked by greed and hatred and “smooth” out ways made impassable by sin and death. There are so many wastelands and barren places into which we can bring life, so many crooked roads we can transform into highways if we would work for justice and reconciliation like the Amish did last fall.
Undoubtedly, you have a wish list of what you would like for Christmas, a thing or two that you would love to add to your worldly possessions, but John speaks to us of a gift worth far more than anything we will ever find under a Christmas tree: the salvation of God. To experience this gift, he urges us to think of what we need to let go of that stands in the way between God and us. Unlike the Amish, that would not be our modern conveniences, so what might they be?
In so many words, the prophet tells us that sin and apathy block us from having an honest and forthright relationship with Jesus Christ. They hinder us from savoring the gift of salvation that God so generously offers us in the person of his son, Jesus, through the Mass, scripture, prayer, and the teachings of our Church. If we want this gift, John is telling us that we must first do some road construction in our lives.
We must fill our valleys and level our mountains, not literally with bulldozers but with attention to our relationships. The valleys he speaks of we create with kind words left unspoken, compassionate deeds undone, bread not shared, prayers unsaid, neighbors and strangers not welcomed, the poor overlooked, the expressions of another person’s love ignored, or forgiveness withheld.
John challenges us to level our mountains of pride, blind ambition, arrogance, unbridled selfishness, domineering attitudes, all of which hinder us from experiencing and sharing God’s gifts of salvation and love with others. He calls on us to smooth the rough ways in our lives created by anger, impatience, intolerance, prejudice, racism, bigotry and favoritism; anything that leaves anyone feeling excluded and unloved. Heeding his call to forgiveness and reconciliation could result in one of the best Christmas presents that you and your loved ones could ever receive.
Granted, the task of moving our personal obstacles may seem overwhelming but just as God led the Israelites so long ago, God seeks to lead us in joy. One way God does this today is through the sacrament of reconciliation. For a lot of us, that gift is like the Christmas present we didn’t appreciate or know what to do with so we’ve left it in the closet to collect dust. Instead of ignoring this beautiful gift, I urge you to come to our Advent Reconciliation service this Thursday evening at 7 and see for yourself what a wonderful gift God offers us in this sacrament.
Joy is what many of us seek in life, especially at Christmas and that is something both the giver and receiver experience when a gift is fully appreciated. But joy is more than a reaction. Joy is also the echo of God’s life within us, which becomes very real when we dare to seek and celebrate God’s gift of forgiveness.