St. Bernadette Catholic Church

Are you in the zone? Athletes often use the lingo of being in the zone when they experience moments of peak performance. For whatever reasons, mind and body come together and the athlete knows that she is exceling at her potential. The same can be said in part for a spiritual life. What God most ardently desires is that we live in the "peak" moments of His love. Like the athlete reveling in the movement of his body, we are meant to experience moments of joy that the grace of God makes possible. We can say we are in the zone spiritually.

The question is how do we get there and stay there in this zone. This is the message of Advent. We are invited to make extra effort to hear and receive God's grace in new ways in preparation for Christmas. Ultimately, our faith and the movement of the Spirit in our hearts is a gift from God, but it is a gift that we willingly receive through doing our own spiritual work. Like the athlete who practices endless hours for those peak moments to happen, we too must invest our time and efforts in to the spiritual life to sharpen our awareness of grace. The only way is through prayer and reflection.

Its kind of an ironic stretch to bring together a feast day honoring Christ the King and a reading about the "King" Jesus dying on the cross between two criminals. It seems more sense to spotlight a reading of the glorious risen Christ after the resurrection. But this match of reading and feast day says much about where we are to find this Kingdom or Reign of God and how we are to be a part of it.

If you had to pick out the most important paragraph or two out of the gospel of Luke, it would be these paragraphs that depict the cruxificion. For Luke and the other gospel writers, the message being conveyed here is the epicenter or essence of what the Christian faith is about. What is the Christian life about? Simply, it is the cross. What Jesus taught and lived is that true life is found when a person offers his or her life out of love and dies to the life known before. We all will experience this at the end of our lives, but more importantly we need for this to happen each day somehow and possibly each opportune moment. Dying to self through giving of self in love is the holy and cosmic pattern that Jesus modeled for us and God affirmed through His resurrection. So, we find the Reign of God or the experience of God in the struggle of love of others and in the struggle of surrender in prayer. In this way, in a manner of speaking, the gate to the Kingdom is the one sitting next to us or the one encouraging us to take another spiritual step in our lives.