HERE we go
again! These words may be spoken either in
cynicism or with much hope, expectation and excitement as
we begin
another liturgical year with the celebration of the
Advent season.
Of course, we
should try our best that we speak these
words with joy and expectation as we make another
proximate
preparation for the birth of Christ, our redeemer. With
Advent we put
ourselves in the liturgical dynamics of Christian life
where we go
through another year doing everything not only by
ourselves, but also
with Christ with the view of reaching our ultimate goal
and not just
any temporal goal.
That’s what the
liturgy means. Christ, through the
sacramental signs, takes the initiative to come and live
with us,
guiding and leading us to where we should be even as we
immerse
ourselves in our different conditions and circumstances
in the world.
We need to be
most aware of this basic truth of our faith.
We are not living by ourselves alone. We are living with
Christ who
continues to create and re-create us with his redemptive
work. It
would be a great pity to miss the significance of the
liturgy and
therefore fail to do our part in corresponding to Christ’s
continuing
redeeming action on us.
As we start
another liturgical year, let us try to assume
that attitude once expressed beautifully by St. Paul: “Do
you not know
that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the
prize? Run
in such a way as to get the prize. Everyone who competes
in the games
goes into strict training. They do it to get a crown that
will not
last, but we do it to get a crown that will last forever.
“Therefore, I
do not run like someone running aimlessly; I
do not fight like a boxer beating the air. No, I strike a
blow to my
body and make it my slave so that after I have preached
to others, I
myself will not be disqualified for the prize.” (1 Cor
9,24-27)
With another
liturgical year opening for us, we are given
another chance to run our life with Christ. The different
liturgical
seasons, namely, Advent, Christmas, Ordinary Time, Lent,
Easter,
Pentecost, Ordinary Time again, provide us the complete
life and
teaching of Christ that is necessary for us to live our
Christian life
amid the different circumstances of our life.
Everyone of us
should try our best to follow the
liturgical cycle to be able to follow Christ closely and
to be a more
effective member of the Church, working together with
Christ for the
salvation of all humanity.
In other words,
our life should be liturgical. It should
develop at the instance of the liturgy which nourishes
our moral and
spiritual life, our love for God and for everybody else.
It’s in the
liturgy that we can be with Christ in the most intimate
way here in
our earthly sojourn.
Obviously, our
participation in the liturgy should not be
passive. Even if in the liturgy Christ takes the
initiative and its
effectiveness lies more on Christ’s power than on our
disposition,
just the same we are expected to correspond to Christ’s
action in the
liturgy as actively as we can. We should try our best to
know what is
happening in any liturgical celebration and what we are
supposed to do
to correspond to Christ’s action.
We have to do a
lot of catechesis in this regard, because
we cannot deny that nowadays, many people, especially the
young, are
ignorant of the true significance of the liturgy in our
life.
Of course, we
cannot ignore either the many efforts of
some people to do some catechesis especially in the
different cells of
the Basic Ecclesial Communities (BEC) established in the
different
parishes in our country.
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