By Fr. Richard Gennaro Cipolla

From the Epistle:  “Besides this you know what hour it is, how it is full time now for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed; the night is far gone, the day is at hand. Let us then cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.” (Romans 13:11-14)

“You know what hour it is”, says St. Paul.  You know the time in which you are living.  That is quite a statement.  What is the time in which we are living?  2020 Anno Domini, or the Common Era?  How is this time in which we are living defined? Well, that definition depends on your perspective, and the perspective on this First Sunday in Advent is a liturgical perspective.  The time is Advent.  This is the time of waiting.  We all know what waiting is like.  We wait for so many things in our lives, and most of this waiting time is killing time, killing time to get onto the next thing.  We wait in line at the bank. We wait in line at the infamous Motor Vehicles Office.  We wait in line at the doctor’s office, and we kill that time by looking at empty headed magazines that fill the time, that kill the time.  We wait in line for a ticket to the latest must go to concert, grasping the ticket when we get it, something to look forward to.  Killing time in order to get to the next thing in our lives.  

But the past eight months have been different.  We have not been killing time until the next event that will satisfy us.  Rather since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic we have been marking time, part of that marking full of anxiety and dread, living in a situation over which we have little control, some control, but yet in the end no control.  The images by now have become familiar:  the crowded hospitals, the announcements of the increasing number of cases and more piercingly,  the number of deaths.  For many people this time of waiting has been punctuated by the suddenness of death, death of a loved one, and often deprived of that farewell, that clutch of the hand, the words, I love you.  For most of us we live in a time in which those basic human gestures that convey love and friendship, the hugs, the laughter, the tears, the sharing of food, and for Catholics the deprivation in many cases of the center of our lives of faith the worship of God in the Holy Mas:  the very basic human acts that convey and strengthen relationships between one another have become clouded not only by masks that are worn to help prevent spread of the virus but also most importantly by the constant threat of a force that threatens our lives and the reality of our relationships.  

The irony is that we have too much time right now. This is not a time to kill time. This is a time in which we fear that time will kill us.  But there is hope in this present darkness, this time of disorientation, this time of unease that is not general but specific.  And the ground of our hope is a vaccine, that science will come to our rescue and that once we have the vaccine against the dreaded virus, all will be well, and we can forget what we have been through and live normal lives, normal lives of waiting and killing time.  Nothing can be done. We just have to wait it out with anxiety or with stoic calm.  The result has nothing in the end to do with us and our waiting.  The triumph over the virus, the end of the constant gnawing fear, will come.  What we have waited for will come, the vaccine, then  we will go on as before.

But Advent time is radically different. For we are waiting for what has already come and what will come.  There is not a question here of killing time, for time has already been transformed from something to get through with at least pain as possible in a linear progression to something that radiates from a central point and which propels us to the end of the radius that is the center of the circle.  For when God entered time two thousand years ago, time was transformed.  There is no longer any linear secular time. That is an illusion. That is time to kill. When eternity entered time in the person of Jesus Christ, he becomes the center of time, and all time before and after reflects that center and is defined by that center that radiates out like the light of the star of Bethlehem.  In Christ, time has been sanctified, and Advent is that time of waiting for what has happened on the trajectory that will mark the end of time, the fulfillment of time, what Jesus describes in today’s Gospel for the First Sunday of Advent as the end of time, the judgment day, the day of reckoning, of a literal counting up of the seconds of eternity, and woe be to that person who has killed time, who has wasted that precious time that has been given to us to do what has to be done.  For how we use this precious, this sacred time, does determine the ultimate outcome for each of us.

What I do, who I am: in this time of waiting that is our lives, that is the life of the world: this determines,–no vaccine here–this determines whether I will be one of those in the filed who are taken of one of those grinding meal: one will be taken, one will be left.  Everything depends on how I wait:  either in killing time by focusing on the world’s illusions that there is always time to do what has to be done, that time will go on in the future and I will always have time to fill my barns against disasters and all will turn out well in the end: that end is a dead end.  Or whether I wait facing the East where the Dawn always rises and whose Light defines all time and my future and the future of the world, and by whose rays I live my life, those rays that are the life-cord to my heart, as I move outward to the end, fearing never the night of Advent but always turned with my face to the Light, to the Star, to the Glory.

How am I waiting?  Am I in the end just focusing on killing time until I get to where I want to be, figuring out the best moves to get to the end of the line as fast as possible?  Am I in the religious line looking at my watch at Mass to see how much time this has killed before I get to do something I want to do?  Do I look at someone’s death as something that has nothing to do with me, another wake to go to, another funeral, and refuse to see what this is calling me to? I who have made so many compromises with the world so that I think that active waiting means manipulating people and events so that husband, wife, children, job, friends, become excuses to turn way from the eternal East and focus on the darkness of the West, to deny the demand that Advent makes for me to actively wait for the one who  is the center of time and space and reality, the person of Jesus Christ?

We wait for thy loving kindness, O Lord.  Much is at stake. The night is far spent. The day is at hand. Christmas, that great and glorious feast, so full of sweetness and light and hope, even in these times of darkness, will come and go. And what then will we wait for?  For next Christmas?  Or for the day of our salvation?

From T.S. Eliot’s Little Gidding:

A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern 
Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails 
On a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England. 

With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling 

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring 
Will be to arrive where we started 
And know the place for the first time. 
Through the unknown, unremembered gate 
When the last of earth left to discover 
Is that which was the beginning; 
At the source of the longest river 
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree

Not known, because not looked for 
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always– 
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded 
Into the crowned knot of fire 
And the fire and the rose are one.

Fr. Richard Gennaro Cipolla

Father Cipolla will be celebrating Traditional Masses at St. Pius X Church in Fairfield, CT for the four Mondays in Advent: November 30, December 7th, 14th and 21st. Traditional Masses will also be offered on the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, December 8, the Feast of the Holy Innocents, Dec. 28 and Epiphany, January 6. All Masses are at 7pm. Mark you calendar!

Sts. Cyril and Methodius Oratory in Bridgeport, CT held Forty Hours’ Devotion, which ended today.

By Father Richard Cipolla

Next Sunday is the Last Sunday after Pentecost. The Gospel for that Sunday ends the Church Year with the “bang” of the Last Things. It is indeed fitting that the Last Sunday of the Church Year should call our attention to the consummation of all things in Jesus Christ when he will come to judge the living and the dead and usher in the triumph of the Kingdom of God. 

 This Last Sunday is followed by the First Sunday in Advent, that wonderful season of preparation of the feast of Christmas marking that event that changed history forever in the birth of Jesus Christ, the Savior of the world who is God and man. The season of Advent in the Northern hemisphere is marked by darkness as we approach the shortest day of the year. It is significant that Christmas is celebrated a few days after the winter solstice, when the night begins to yield to the light of day. The birth of the Christ Child is the beginning of the conquering of the darkness of sin and death, the essence of hope that Light will conquer darkness. 

It has become a popular custom in the Christmas season for candles to be placed in the window of homes as a symbol of the Light of the world who was born into this world over two thousand years ago. I have always been a stickler about not anticipating Christmas too far in advance. I have always insisted on keeping Advent almost in opposition to the secular and commercial push to begin Christmas on Thanksgiving Day and ending it on Christmas Eve. So I have always frowned on Christmas decorations being displayed before at least the O! Antiphons. I have tried to refrain from listening to Christmas music before late Advent.  No candles in the windows until after the feast of St. Lucy.

But this year is deeply different. Where I live in the United States the past year has been one of social and political turmoil that has caused great pain to all Americans. But this pain and turmoil is not confined to the United States. The whole world seems to be in a state of turmoil and deep uncertainty about the future. And the deepest affliction that grips the whole world is the COVID-19 pandemic. As I write the whole world is engulfed in the worst phase of the pandemic in terms of deaths and the number people afflicted with this virus with various levels of virulence.  But just as significant is the rupture of familial and social bonds. Loneliness is the norm. The lack of touch, of embrace, of eating together, for Catholics the deprivation of participation in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, for all Christians the inability to worship God on Sunday as a community: this is a cause of deep sadness that cannot be quantified by charts and admonitions.

In this situation I offer a modest proposal.  Let every Catholic home put candles in the windows of their homes beginning on the First Sunday of Advent.  This year is not a time to wait until Christmas is imminent. Those lights in our windows have to shine forth in this time of physical and spiritual darkness to proclaim to those around us that Christ is the Light of the world especially in times of terrible darkness. And let those lights shine forth every night in Advent and through Christmastide to the glorious feast of the Epiphany commemorating the whole world brought to Christ by the light of a Star. So many of us will not have the loving company of our families and friends this Christmas.  But in our own and small way amidst this real pain we must remind the world of the Good News of Jesus Christ who alone can pierce the darkness of this world. Put those candles in your windows and witness to the Light in the darkness!

Father Richard Cipolla

This coming Saturday, November 7th, at 9:30 am there will be a Month Mind Requiem Mass, followed by the Rite of Absolution, for the eternal repose of the soul of Msgr. Joseph Ambrosio at the Church of Mt. Carmel in Newark, NJ (259 Oliver Street).
Please, share this information with those who knew the good Monsignor!

By Fr. Richard Gennaro Cipolla

After this I saw a great multitude which no man could number, out of all nations and tribes and peoples and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes and with palms in their hands: and they cried out with a loud voice saying: “Salvation belongs to our God who sits upon the throne, and to the Lamb.”

This is the heart of the book of Revelation, the eternal worship of God in heaven by the saints.  How abused is this, the last book of the New Testament, by those who are looking for special numbers and signs, looking for clues to times and dates, looking for arcane and Gnostic messages, treating this book as if it were a sequel to a trashy novel about angels and demons.   Yes, there is war in heaven, yes there is the dragon who seeks to destroy the woman and the child, but at the very heart of the book of Revelation, the Apocalypse is the worship of God by the saints in heaven, and what we do here today is the earthly reflection of this worship in heaven by the saints of God.  

Who are these like stars appearing?  Who are these dressed in white?  They are the martyrs, holding their palms; they are the apostles, the confessors, the doctors, the virgins, the holy men and women whom we celebrate today on the feast of All Saints. And we celebrate the saints not as dead people remote from us, not as people of yore that we can look to merely for examples of goodly living, the saints as textbooks for the pilgrim’s progress. The saints are living members of the living Church of Jesus Christ, those who live with him now in the Church triumphant.

 One of the tragedies of the Protestant reformation, and there are many, was the denial of the reality of the saints.  When they went into the churches and smashed the statues of the saints, claiming they were idols, they denied the reality of something fundamental to the Christian faith; the reality of grace.  They imagined salvation as something merely personal, something between God and me, something in the end juridical affecting,  only the individual.  How different this is from the image we just heard in the book of Revelation, for salvation, therefore grace, can never be merely an agreement, a happening between the individual and God. 

When God became man, when God entered this fallen universe of ours, he did not do so solely for me or for you, but pro nobis:  qui propter nos homines et propter nostram salutem:  our, not my.  You say mere words:  no, this is crucial.  The Church is not a collection of individuals: the Church is essentially community: I am saved because we are saved.  One of the sad ironies of the confused state of contemporary Catholicism is Catholics belting out Amazing Grace at the Mass.  Have you ever read and thought about the words to this Puritan hymn?  Probably not.  You are carried away by the tune and the singablity of it all, some of us remembering Judy Collins singing this in her once clear voice.  Look at the words of this Protestant hymn and count the number of times the pronouns “I” or “me” occur.  Many.  For this is the quintessential Protestant affirmation of salvation as individualistic and not communal.

Why do I go on about this communal essence of the Catholic faith?  Because that is what we are celebrating today, the communion of saints, and this is not in some vague general way that can be affirmed by an ecumenical commission.  But it is deeper than that. What this day is at its heart is a celebration of the reality of grace.  And grace not just as a pious word, but as the very presence of God within this world, the presence of God going ahead of us and calling us, the presence of God calling us to repentance and forgiveness, the grace of God that does forgive us and renew us in the sacrament of confession, the grace of God that enters into our bodies and souls in Holy Communion, the grace of God that abounds ever more than the sin that infects us and affects us, the grace of God that is the only basis of our hope for everlasting life. 

 And yet grace is so often talked about in terms that echo the conversation in Alice in Wonderland between Alice and the White Queen.  The Queen offers Alice some jam, and Alice says: “No, thank you, I don’t want jam today.  The Queen responds:  “You couldn’t have it if you DID want it.  The rule is: jam tomorrow, jam yesterday but never jam today.”  How many people think of grace in this way, as something always in the future, in the sweet by and by when we shall meet at that beautiful shore?  No, the saints are those men and women who have been transformed by grace in this world, in the here and now, who have allowed themselves to be seized by the presence of God, allowed themselves to be surprised by joy and to be ravished by that joy. They are the proof that grace is real and is the power of God within this world of conflict between good and evil. 

 Look, there is Joseph looking at the baby in the manger holding his lantern, doing what he does not understand but what he knows is good and true.  Look there is Peter, the fisherman, the one who never seemed to understand, now on the Vatican Hill being crucified upside down, whose blood, with the blood of his brother Paul, sanctifies the pagan city of Rome.  Look, there is Antony fleeing into the desert, seeking the still small voice of God, filled with the grace that fills him with the knowledge that it is in silence that God is heard.  Look, there is Monica, wetting the ground with her tears for her son wherever she walks, there she is with her son in Ostia in that moment when grace seizes them both and they see far beyond their sight. Look, there is Teresa of Avila in the rain and mud, dragging her wagon carrying the Blessed Sacrament to a new convent. Look there is Isaac Jogues being cruelly tortured by the Indians he wanted so much to bring to Christ, his body racked with pain, and yet filled with the life of grace. Look, there is Therese of Lisieux in the darkness of death, she who talked of roses and the child Jesus, there she is surrounded by her well meaning but merely religious sisters who are hoping to see some sign of magic saintliness, but she refuses to succumb to the acid of sentimentality, and in her darkness utters those words that are the heart of the universe after the incarnation:  tout est grace, tout est grace.  Grace is everywhere.  

And there is Maximillian Kolbe in the hell of Auschwitz who sees clearly by the light of grace that he is to die for a Jew just as a Jew, who was rejected by his people and who was God incarnate, died for him and for us.  They are countless, they are real, they give us hope. They are holy , they are with God, but they are a part of who we are as the Church, they care about us, they pray for us as we ask them to pray for us, they are who we hope and pray we will be, and there, look, there is she who bore the infinite God in the finite small space of her womb, she who is the Mother of God and our Mother, she who is our life, our sweetness and our hope she who in Dante’s words is Virgine Madre, figlia del tuo figlio, umile e alta più che creatura, termine fisso d’eterno consiglio, Virgin Mother, daughter of thy Son, humbled and exalted more than any creature, fixed goal of the eternal counsel.

But the saints are also the positive and real effects of the incarnation in time and space.  It is not as if God became man and did what he had to do on earth and then ascended back into heaven leaving no trace except the written word of the Bible and personal faith based on that.  No, the incarnation changed space and time itself. Emmanuel means God with us, grace with us, and the saints are the reality of this sanctification of time and space by God’s flesh and blood in Jesus Christ.  The very celebration of this feast in time, that we come here, is in obedience to this new situation in which secular time read by the clock is now transformed into the kiss of time and eternity.  There is no daylight saving time in the universe where entropy is reversed and the light of the Son of God pierces the darkness. The whole cycle of the feasts of the Church, whether the feasts of our Lord, of our Lady, of the Saints, these celebrations, especially those we call holy days of obligations, are reminders that time and space have been transformed by Christ, and whether or not the world knows this or not, we know it, and we respond to this sanctification of time by coming here, and doing what we do, remembering by entering into the worship of heaven which is the holy Mass.  How misguided are those leaders of the Church  who manipulate holy days of obligation, now it is a holy day, now it isn’t, because it is a Monday or  Saturday,  all in the name of making it less of a burden to our people. But the burden is the point. How can we remember if we are not obligated to come here and do this, do this in remembrance of him in the communion of the members of the Church of all time and space, how can we remember that grace is real if we are not taken out by force from the world that has forgotten what it knew or is supposed to have known?  

And just as the creator of the universe was contained in the little womb of Mary, so too in this church, this small space, a very tiny fraction of the universe of time and space, heaven itself becomes present, for when Christ becomes bodily present under the forms of bread and wine, when God incarnate enters into this place, he brings with him the entire hosts of heavens:  et ideo cum angelis et archangelis: and therefore with the angels and archangels, with Thrones and Dominations and with the whole heavenly host, we sing a hymn to your glory. Sanctus. Sanctus. Sanctus!  

Fr. Richard Gennaro Cipolla