From Consumerism to Conversion, Second Friday of Advent, December 10, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Friday of the Second Week of Advent
Memorial of Our Lady of Loreto
December 10, 2021
Is 48:7-19, Ps 1, Mt 11:16-19

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• As we have been pondering, Advent involves a triple dynamism: the Lord comes, we go out to meet him with lighted lamps, and then, transformed by the encounter with the Bridegroom, we continue to journey with him and finish together with him his mission.
• When we go out to meet him, it’s not just to shake his hand but to have him shake us up and transform us. In the Gospel today, Jesus says that many of us don’t encounter him with that conversion in mind. He describes his generation — and frankly every generation — like children in marketplaces “sitting” — in other words, not wanting to move. They’re playing different music and want everyone to respond to that music: if they play the flute, they want people to dance; if they play a dirge, they want people to mourn. The key is that they themselves want to set the terms of the interaction. Rather than convert, they want the others to move and change. That’s what Jesus was saying they were doing with both of the figures that the Jewish people had been awaiting, “Elijah” and the “Messiah,” the precursor and the Anointed One, ultimately God’s messenger and God himself. They criticized John the Baptist for his ascetical fasting; and when Jesus wasn’t fasting because he was showing us how to rejoice because the Bridegroom was with us, they criticized him for drawing close in mercy to the hedonists like the tax collectors and other sinners, who were enjoying the things of this world in a disordered way. They failed to grasp that it’s we who should be dancing to the Lord’s music and not the other way around. They were classifying-and-conquering not only the principal figure of preparation for the Messiah’s Advent, St. John the Baptist, but the Messiah himself.
• I also think it’s significant that Jesus describes them as sitting in the “marketplace.” The marketplace is where we go to buy things according to our preferences. Today this is an issue because in the marketplace we learn a type of “consumerism” that can then come to impact our faith. We like things to happen according to our pleasures and preferences: we like certain Mass times and not others, certain liturgical forms, certain music or none, certain popes, bishops or priests, certain Psalm tones, certain Eucharistic prayers, certain lengths of homilies, certain messages, certain styles. This consumerism can cause us to behave much like the children in the marketplace, trying to play the music for our relationship with the Lord. We play soft, sentimental hits and want the Lord just to touch our emotions. We’ll play marches and want the Lord to discipline those we criticize and boss them around like a drill sergeant. We’ll play horror movie music to try to “scare the hell” out of people. We’ll play heavy metal and drown out the Lord’s whisper. We won’t play any music at all, because we’re in a bad mood, or hate music, or can’t sing, or anything else. The point is that we need to attune ourselves to what the Lord is playing.
• In the first reading, God tells us through Isaiah, “I, the Lord, your God, teach you what is for your good, and lead you on the way you should go.” We need to allow him to teach and guide us, rather than our seeking to teach him how the world, our life and the lives of those around us should run. We need to follow him rather than, like Peter when Jesus called him “Satan,” try to lead him. We prayed in the Psalm, “Those who follow you Lord will have the light of life,” a phase taken from Jesus’ words in St. John’s Gospel. Those who don’t follow the Lord, we infer from these words and confirm from personal experience, wander in darkness. The Psalmist describes the type of fruit we’ll produce when we align ourselves to the Lord’s music, when we delight in the law of the Lord and meditate on his law day and night: we will be like a tree planted near running water, that yields its fruit in due season, and whose leaves never fade. When we listen to what the Lord teaches us for our own good and allow him to lead us on the way we should go, hearkening to his commandments, as Isaiah tells us, we will spiritually prosper like a river. But if we don’t, if we want to remain in control, the Psalmist tells us we will be like chaff, dead airy matter with no holy solidity, blown away by our whims.
• The one who best shows us how to adjust our lives to the Lord’s music is Our Lady, whose fiat is a summary of her entire life, attuning herself constantly to what the Lord was asking, even when her own heart would be pierced. Two years ago, on October 31, 2019, Pope Francis, though the Vatican’s Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, decreed that the memorial of Our Lady of Loreto, celebrated each year on December 10, be extended to the entire Church. Last August 14, he extended the “Year of Our Lady of Loreto” marking the 100th anniversary of Our Lady of Loreto’s being named patroness of aviators and air passengers, through 2021 and likewise extended it to the whole Church. December 10 was the day in 1294 when, according to tradition, the holy house where Mary was born, where the Archangel Gabriel visited her, and where the Word became flesh, arrived in the Italian hillside town of Loreto, where, eventually, a great basilica was built above it to house it. It’s Italy’s most important, and most visited, Marian shrine. It’s a place in which we can ponder the Immaculate Conception, the Incarnation and Mary’s response to God to let her whole life happen according to God’s word. This feast, therefore, is an occasion for us to pray about God’s desire for us to be holy and immaculate in his sight, Jesus’ becoming one of us to make that happen, and our cooperation with his merciful action. By her fiat, Mary fully shares in that mission. In the Litany of Blessed Virgin Mary, commonly known as the Litany of Loreto because of its association with that Basilica, where it was first used in 1558 and eventually was set to music in such a way that Pope Sixtus V in 1587 decreed that all other Marian litanies should be suppressed in its favor, we turn to Mary and invoke her in many ways relevant to her fiat, as “mirror of justice” (who is God), “virgin most prudent” (ordering our whole life to God), “virgin most faithful,” as “queen of all saints” and others. Today we ask her help that we may totally attune our life to her Son, to leave behind our desire to sing at our speed, at our pitch, with our version of the lyrics, with the melody that might please us most, to singing, like her, the Lord’s Song which is ever new. We ask her to help us to synchronize ourselves to Jesus’ music so that as we go out to meet him who is coming and like Mary sing an eternal Magnificat in his presence.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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