Sermon for Gaudete Sunday by Fr. Cipolla

Sermon for Gaudete Sunday 2012 by Father Richard Cipolla
St. Mary Church, Norwalk, CT
Shout for joy, O daughter Sion! Sing joyfully, O Israel! Be glad and exult with all your heart, O daughter Jerusalem . Rejoice in the Lord, always! And again I say, rejoice!

I was driving to school on Friday, and as always at this time of year, it was still dark. I had finished my rosary and decided to continue listening to one of Bach’s Christmas Cantatas that I had started the previous day. This was a new CD, so I had not heard the whole piece. What I had heard, as always with Bach, I loved. But suddenly an aria for baritone began with the most amazing display of virtuoso trumpets I have ever heard. They were accompanied by an oboe playing in the upper registers. Listening to the genius of this music, the exuberance of the Baroque, I was deeply moved. I felt my chest contract and then grow large and tears came to my eyes, tears of deep joy, tears that were my thanksgiving for this music. When I got to school, I looked at the text: and this is the text in English: exult, ye veins and limbs, arise with joy! This outpouring of joy at the birth of Christ the Saviour, and I remembered that the coming Sunday is Gaudete Sunday, rose vestments, the organ plays, that wonderful anticipation of Christmas.

That day I received an email from home asking whether I had heard about a shooting in Newtown. I had been teaching, so I did not know and did not think about it until I got into my car to drive home. And that is when I heard what had happened in Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown. And as I listened to the details, as I tried to imagine this unimaginable scene of death and grief, I found myself, for the second time that day, in tears. And this time those tears came not from a heart swelling with the genius of music of joy but rather from the depths of a sadness that overwhelmed me. What happened there, the act, is unspeakable. The Latin term is infandum: that which must not be spoken about. Like all parents, I immediately thought of my own children when they were that age, and what would it have been like, two weeks before Christmas, to be told that they were massacred in school, my children, my babies. And once again, there is something so terrible there, that something shuts down inside rather than confront this res infanda, this thing that cannot be spoken about. And what came to my mind was that lovely but plaintive carol that sings about the slaughter of the Holy Innocents whom we celebrate three days after Christmas: Lullay, lullay, thou little tiny child, bye-bye, lully lullay.
O sisters too, how may we do,
For to preserve this day
This poor youngling for whom we do sing
Bye, bye, lully, lullay.

We all watched the news coverage, the confusion about the facts, the wrong names, the wails from the parents who were told that their children had died. There were, of course, the media psychologists prattling on about the importance of maintaining sound mental health in preventing such things happening. There were, of course, those who blamed what had happened on the lack of gun control, and that if stricter laws were enforced that these things would no longer happen. There were those trying to understand in so many ways why this happened, in the hope that if we know certain facts that this will somehow get rid of the deep pain that the event has caused. But the best assessment of the situation came from the lips of someone I would never have expected to say such a thing: Governor Dannel Malloy said: evil has visited this community. And that, my friends, is the truth. In a society that has pretended for so many years that evil does not exist, that it is only bad or crazy people doing bad or crazy things, and that this can always be explained by some form of psychology. But evil does exist and it has existed from the beginning of the creation, that power that first rebelled against God and hates in a way that we cannot imagine, that hates beauty, truth and above all love. We all know about the evil of war, of the loss of so many lives in war. We see Syrians killing Syrians, Egyptians rioting, Israelis and Palestinians always on the brink of disaster. We see this and know evil lurks in all of this, but it is far away and it, after all, is war, and that is what war is about. And there are some wars that at least have a cause to fight for, and that mitigates the presence of evil for many. So very many people suffered from the onslaught of the recent hurricane, people died, homes destroyed, some form of evil is there present, but we say it’s part of nature. But when things happen like happened in Newtown, we can no longer look away, for here we see the terrible randomness and meaninglessness that is at the heart of the darkness of evil. Such violence against children in a safe setting can never be dismissed or lessened by appeals to psychology or stricter laws. And we realize the truth: no one can guarantee safety in the ultimate sense in this fallen world. The President called for an end to the violence of the string of massacres we have seen in this country in the past decade. He said this as if he or any one else had the power to stop this violence, especially in a culture where violence is done to babies in the womb every day, as if this constant violence at such deep levels does not spill over into the society that condones this violence as a right.

Someone who is a nurse in Newtown, who comes to this parish as and who knows some of the families and children afflicted asked me last night: what do I say to them, what are the right words? I answered her: there is nothing to say, nothing to say when confronting this res infanda. What you must do is to embrace them, hug them, cry with them, rock them as you would your child. For we as Catholics always have before us the image of Mary holding the body of her dead Son, gazing upon something infandum, the torture and death of the Son of God, the torture and death of her child, her baby, holding him in silence, remembering how she held him close to her in the cold of the night, and in that silence seeing that light that is always able to penetrate the most evil-ridden darkness. Silence: the silence of the embrace, the silence of prayer. There is the only answer to the infandum.

What happened to my joy that caused my heart to swell when I heard that Bach aria in my car? It is still there. It is different, but it is still there. And it is still here on this Gaudete Sunday, when we are asked to rejoice at the coming of our Savior. One practical thing we always have to remember. God cannot guarantee our safety. He can, if we will let him, guarantee our salvation. And there is the cause of our joy today. Christian joy is never a generalized feeling of happiness that all is going well in our lives. Christian joy never denies the presence of evil in the world, it never denies the reality of the transitory nature of this life. Christian joy has its roots in the God who loved us so much that he sent his only begotten Son to be born into this world so that he could die for us, so that the power of sin and death no longer has us in its dark and icy grip, so that, through faith we may have eternal life with Him. Our prayers are with those grieving families today and especially on Christmas Day. We pray for the children and teachers who died that they may rest in the arms of Christ. We pray for those parents and children who were forced to confront evil in the worst way that their faith in Christ will be the basis of their hope for the future. And we pray for ourselves, that we contemplate this tragedy in the light of our faith and that we truly prepare ourselves for the joy of Christmas Day.

Lullaby, my Jesus, lullaby my King,
Lullaby my lordling whom I sweetly sing.
Slumber softly, slumber on your mother’s arm,
She will rock you, she will keep you safe from harm.

Lullaby my Jeus, lullaby my son,
Lullaby my child in whom God’s will is done.
Be at peace, soft dreams beguile you as you lie,
I will rock you, rock you, rock you,
I will sing a lullaby.