Nm 6:22-27; Ps 67:2-3, 5, 6, 8; Gal 4:4-7; Lk 2:16-21
Right after we’re born, we become aware of ourselves as ‘a person’, as a human being, when we come face-to-face with someone who validates the goodness of our being. Someone whose gaze, whose facial expressions say: “How good it is that you’re here, alive!” When we are valued, not for any advantage we might bring to someone, but SIMPLY FOR BEING WHO WE ARE.
We come to “be” when someone looks at us with delight, joy, and satisfaction because we exist… yes… simply because we exist.
And one of these priceless moments – maybe the first of all these moments (maybe you don’t remember that) is when our MOMS held us in their arms and SMILED AT US WITH LOVE. No matter how your upbringing turned out, there was a first someone to pick up those 7 pounds of human life, 20 inches long (you as a baby!), and smile at you simply because you ‘are’!
And even if still unconsciously, because our brains still work in a ‘baby way’, our hearts are told that we are precious, that we are worthy of love and capable of loving! That smile ‘shining upon us’ is extremely important, not only for our psychological health, but also for our self-understanding as children of God; children created by God for a great, holy, eternal purpose.
In the First Reading of this 8th day of Christmas, the first day of the year, we are greeted by the luminous and tender ‘Smile of God’ contained in that beautiful and well-known blessing of Aaron: “The Lord bless you and keep you! The Lord let His face shine upon you! The Lord look upon you kindly and give you Peace!”
And the main message of this blessing lies in the Hebrew word שׁלום (šālôm). The God who wanted and created us ‘for who we are’ smiles at us and sends us his Shalom. And this very powerful word, Shalom, which today is translated as ‘hello’, actually means: health, security, inner harmony, wellness, material prosperity, and also a long life. But we can still go further:
Shalom is the first word that the Risen Jesus said to His disciples when He appeared to them in Jerusalem, on that ‘Eighth and First’ Day of the week.
At that moment, after Jesus’ death, the disciples were terrified, locked inside a house, but Jesus appeared and, we might say, smiled at them. His mere presence there overwhelmed them with an intense joy. So, there was a radical shift from fear and sadness to an intense ‘jubilee’, a complete forgiveness, a profound peace! Shalom!
Today ‘the Word of God made flesh’ invades the confines of our lives and gives us this sure hope: if He is present, if we are exposed to His smile, to His blessing, to His Shalom, all our nights of dread can be changed into the brightest days of glory. We have the experience of a God who is mindful of us! Who considers us important.
Christmas is also this ‘intriguing’ season when very simple things reveal what is most divine!
Picture this: one thing is that I come up to you and tell you that there’s a rollercoaster on fire out there, with Batman hanging from the top, and Spider Man spraying webs all over the place. Like a crazy thing! Maybe, everybody would say: What? Where? Show me! Or even, if I say: Look, the President, Sylvester Stallone, Taylor Swift, and Paul McCartney are outside! Ow my gosh! Call the press! That would cause a massive mayhem, right?!
But if I come to you and say: ‘There’s a mother, a father, and baby lying in a stroller out there!’ Some of you would say: ‘ok, whatever…’ But in the Gospel there’s something quite fascinating: The shepherds went in haste to Bethlehem and found (simply) Mary and Joseph, and the infant lying in the manger. And that ‘picture’ was enough to move them to go out and ‘tell it on the mountain’ what they had seen!
That Baby was not just a little boy, He Himself is our Hope, He is our Salvation, He is the Light of Israel and the whole world!
So, what exactly did they see? Those shepherds were certainly seeing far beyond what the eye can see! And the most striking thing is that ‘all who heard about it were amazed’.
Since God became flesh and broke into our world, the Earth became full of God’s presence, and now God allows Himself to be found. He lets Himself be discovered by us in all things. Now, everything: silence, sound, a tear, a smile, a pain, a difficulty, a weight, a joy, everything is somehow ‘pregnant’ with God’s presence. Time and space now not only conceal but also reveal what is Eternal.
Emmanuel, God is near, and if our hearts are poor, prayerful, and full of expectation, as the hearts of those who were waiting for the consolation of Israel, we won’t miss the moments when He will reveal Himself to us.
And Mary had a heart exactly like that: sensitive, open, and responsive to God. Nothing happened that she didn’t treasure and meditate on deeply within her.
Today we contemplate Mary, the Mother of God, who is herself a beautiful and bright smile of God on earth! Every rebirth, (such as the one we experience on a ‘1st of January’) every new beginning comes through Mary’s motherhood.
Today this smiling Shalom of God comes to us through her. In the course of the dark nights of life, Mary is a pillar of love and strength. She’s always there by our side, believing in our vocation, supporting our decisions for holiness, saying ‘yes’ for us when our own yes is shaky and inconsistent.
If, for whatever reason, we might have lacked many ‘smiles of love’ from mothers or fathers throughout our life, we can be sure that we always have the Smile of Mary to keep us going.
St. Thérèse of Lisieux, who turned out to be a great saint, was healed of a sort of ‘depression’, which could have wrecked her life, by a life-saving smile from Our Lady. May ‘Our Lady of the Smile’ intercede for us and make us live a resurrected life, no longer locked in fear, but brimming with the hope that we can be holy, we can be saints, just as God created us to be.
And as we look at the Mother of God and picture her tender and holy smile, we can hear once again these words of blessing, and welcome the smile of God upon us…
The LORD bless you and keep you!
The LORD let his face shine upon
you, and be gracious to you!
The LORD look upon you kindly and
give you peace!
Father Cristiano Pinheiro
@shalomnewyork
