Santa Clara University

Christmas Letter 1997

Dear Members of the University Community:

On Sunday, I will be celebrating the liturgy in the Mission at 10:00 p.m. The Word of God on this second Sunday of Advent spoken through the prophet Baruch and John the Baptist echoes the beautiful passage from chapter 40 of Isaiah.

For their pilgrimage, God promises the ancient Israelites comfort, leading them along smooth and level roads. Long suffering in exile, they yearn with intense longing and eager anticipation to return to their homeland where they will no longer experience hunger or thirst. Their pilgrimage is about more than just a smooth path and food. God promises to turn their despair over the Babylonian exile into hope of returning to Jerusalem, revealing the glory of the Lord.

At the threshold of the 21st century, the experience of the Israelites seems distant in time and place. Yet in the last 20 years the population of refugees throughout the world has reached 20 million and another 25 million are homeless and hungry in their own countries. In the past few years, pictures of innocent people streaming along hot, dry and dusty paths in Rwanda or along the freezing cold and wet roads of Bosnia were frequently seen in the news. Thankfully, few if any of us have experienced such cruelty and fatigue or such hate and sense of abandonment. We must ask, can such people ever know the prophetic promise of comfort, revealing a compassionate and welcoming God?

While we may never experience the mingling of adversity and relief, despair and hope as the Israelites did or Rwandans and Bosnians still do, our pilgrimage reveals many faces with the need for God's promise of comfort. We see flourishing cities and communities mixed with single mothers struggling on welfare while looking for a job and lonely widows and widowers in nursing homes. We gather as a community to celebrate in the Mission while a homeless man pushes a shopping cart filled with bottles and cans along the El Camino; we enjoy each others friendship in the Adobe Lodge while some members of our community struggle because of the high cost of living in this valley or with other problems beyond their ability to solve. Paradoxically, the glory of God touches our community when we celebrate our successes together and when we lose a friend or family member or colleague. Each of us is touched in different ways. We must ask, do we bring God's comfort by speaking tenderly to each other?

The glory of God comes in all places and moments when our personal pilgrimage is genuinely a time of learning to listen to the voice of God. Like the prophet, the voice of God comes in many ways: in the burning bush and gentle evening breeze, in the death of a friend and birth of a new child, in the gentle quiet of forgiving and being forgiven, in learning about culture and science and about literature and economics and about law and engineering, in helping one of our colleagues or students, and in being as compassionate and welcoming as God is with whomever crosses our path.

Imagining the world as God's altar, Denise Levertov comforts our hearts and community:

God does not act in some distant land or time, but through us. During this season of Advent and Hanukkah, may we let God touch this world through our understanding and compassion as we reach out to those around us. For God scatters the darkness that sometimes covers this world both by a transcendent presence and power and by our good deeds. Then the glory of God is revealed.

I pray the blessing of God on you and your family, and may your pathways be smooth and straight during this holiday season and throughout the new year.

Paul Locatelli, S.J.
President