It's time to clear away the Christmas cards that have come to my house since early December.  For four decades I've been exchanging cards, and this year I asked myself, is this exchange getting to be only a matter of habit?

Because of distance, I have not seen some of these friends for twenty years or more, and I must confess that I have not used all the wonderful telephone bargains advertised on television which are supposed to keep us "in touch" with our friends.  If I were to be reunited with these people, would we really still have anything in common?  When I last saw some of them, their children were infants; today those children are adults.  Once we were young marrieds, new in our careers, with low salaries and mountains of bills.  Today those early financial struggles are past, and some of the friends are actually affluent.  Once I knew their favorite sports, favorite restaurants, their choices among movies, automobiles and 33 r.p.m. records.  Today I know nothing about the small details of their daily lives.  And yet we still write as though we were friends.
 
There is so much, too, I do not know about God.  Do I respond to Him, too, considering what seems to be an incredible distance between Him and me, merely because it is my habit to do so?
 
Today's first reading reminds me that I once enjoyed those now far-off friends because they had within them some facets of God's love.  If God and his love do not change, those old friends must still have something of the Unchangeable in them.  Thus it is not habit but rather a gift of God that we still communicate.

I know that in their distant towns they are still caring for their maturing children, their elderly parents, or for the poor and weak and rejected in their own communities in ways I cannot precisely describe.  Some themselves may be accepting care from those in whom the love of God is finding its perfection.   Is this not reason enough to send them Christmas greetings?
 
The second reading tells the Lord that every nation will adore Him.  I have no knowledge of Tarshish and the Isles, or Arabia and Sheba.  But greetings came to my home from Rhode Island and Santa Barbara, from Osaka and County Cork, Key Largo and Puerto Rico and Guam, because people whom I have not seen for many years and may never see again are at this season adoring our one Lord.

Today's Gospel tells of the disciples helpless on a stormy lake.  Some of us may be surprised that the passage includes the words "He meant to pass them by."  But Jesus was there to answer their cries for help.  This too makes me think of my Christmas friends, those dear ones separated from me by many years and many miles.  So many of them, I know, are answering others' cries for help.  My faith in God, therefore, renews my faith in them, and my faith in them strengthens my faith in Him.  
 
Today's readings help me celebrate the indwelling of God among the peers of my youth, and remind me that His holy presence cannot fade or be extinguished.  None of us has seen God, except in the acts of love that infinitely surpass the empty customs of habit.