Anyone who has read Laudato Si, Pope Francis’ new encyclical, will see that there’s something different about the way this pope teaches. He lacks the theological precision of Benedict XVI or the philosophical bend of St. John Paul II, but his homey, stark, almost brazen messages have captured the world’s attention.
I don’t mean to say his mind is deficient—it’s not—but that above all else, he’s not a theologian or philosopher—he’s a pastor. His goal is to shepherd his people into new encounters with the Lord.
You especially see this pastoral sense in his daily homilies, which he offers each morning at 7:00a.m. to a small collection of gardeners, office workers, nuns, and priests at the Vatican. He speaks to them as if preaching at a little country parish, offering practical advice and memorable aphorisms.
Image Books just published a collection of these homilies titled Encountering Truth: Meeting God in the Everyday. Along with summaries by Radio Vaticana (who recorded and transcribed the homilies) and commentary by Father Antonio Spadaro, SJ, these reflections provide moments of inspiration, simplicity, and a glimpse into the papal world very few ever get to experience.
Today, Image has allowed me to share an excerpt from one of the homilies. Enjoy!
We can’t proclaim Jesus with funeral faces, so we have to trace a line of demarcation with respect to a certain way of understanding the Christian life, marked by sadness. The two readings suggest this reflection to us. The first, from the prophet Zephaniah, presents the exclamation “Rejoice! Shout for joy, the Lord is in your midst!” The second, taken from the Gospel, recounts the episode of Elizabeth and the child who “exults with joy” in her womb at hearing the words of Mary, who had gone in “haste” to help her cousin. So “it is all joy, the joy that is celebration.” Well then, “we Christians are not much accustomed to speaking of joy, of gladness. I believe that we often prefer complaining.” And yet the one “who gives us joy is the Holy Spirit.
“It is the Spirit himself who guides us; he is the author of joy, the creator of joy. And this joy in the Spirit gives us true Christian freedom. Without joy, we Christians cannot become free; we become slaves of our sadness. The great Paul VI said that we cannot carry the Gospel forward with Christians who are sad, disheartened, discouraged. We cannot do it. This attitude like we’re at a funeral. So many Christians have expressions like they’re going to a funeral procession rather than going to praise God, right? They don’t realize that from joy comes praise, this praise of Mary, this praise that Zephaniah speaks of, this praise of Simeon, of Anna: the praise of God!”
And how do we praise God? We praise him by getting out of ourselves, “gratuitously, just as the grace that he gives us is gratuitous.” In order to conduct an examination of conscience on the ways of praying to God, we can ask someone who goes to Mass.
“‘You who are here at Mass, are you praising God or only asking God for something and thanking him? But do you praise God?’ This is something new, something new in our spiritual life. Praising God, getting out of ourselves to praise, wasting time praising him. ‘This Mass, it’s getting long!’ If you do not praise God, you do not know that gratuitousness of wasting time praising God, and the Mass is long. But if you go with this attitude of joy, of praising God, how wonderful it is! Eternity will be that: praising God! And that will not be boring: it will be wonderful! This joy makes us free.”
The model of this praise, and of this joy, is once again the Mother of Jesus. “The Church calls her ‘cause of our joy,’ Causa Nostrae Laetitiae. Why? Because she is the bearer of the greatest joy, which is Jesus.
“We must pray to the Blessed Mother, that in bearing Jesus she may give us the grace of joy, the freedom of joy. May she give us the grace of praising, of praising with a prayer of gratuitous praise, because he is always worthy of praise. Praying to the Blessed Mother and saying to her as the Church says: Veni, Precelsa Domina, Maria, tu nos visita. Our Lady, you who are so great, visit us and give us joy!”
May 31, 2013
Zephaniah 3:14–18a or Romans 12:9–16
Luke 1:39–56
Excerpted from Encountering Truth by Pope Francis Copyright © 2015 by Radio Vaticana, Città del Vaticano, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, Città del Vaticano RCS Libri S.p.A., Milano. Excerpted by permission of Image Books, a division of Penguin Random House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.