Just as I imagine that your December days are filled with tasks and activities, you can imagine that these days at the Academy have also been full!
Middle school students have donated money to allow students, faculty and parents volunteers to shop for Adopt-A-Family Christmas gifts. Other generous volunteers have stayed after school or come in early to wrap all of those beautiful and thoughtful gifts. All the students in the whole school are singing their hearts out to prepare for their Christmas gift of song for their parents. Students are arriving early to practice lines or study for exams. Teachers are regularly arriving early or staying late to help students study. And, the whole school community is busy preparing for the teas and the props and the sound and the lights and the costumes and the general set up as we continue to prepare for you, our guests, this weekend! And, while all of this is happening, I know that Christmas baskets are slowly filling up in preparation for next week’s Basket Mass.
The beautiful thing about all of this activity is that it is joyful, generous and God-filled. In the Society of the Sacred Heart, we have a phrase to describe this kind of activity: Activity Permeated with Presence! And, by Presence (with a capital P), I mean activity permeated with God.
What is flowing out of everyone’s hearts are behaviors which REFLECT God’s Goodness! This IS Christ-Among-Us. This IS the Body of Christ in action. This IS a current example of what St. Paul was trying to say about himself: it is not I but Christ within me. And I have to say, I see Christ in the actions and activities of all of our students, faculty and parents in a particularly poignant way these days.
That is how it works! When we open our hearts to God, God’s Very Life and Love flow out of us in our actions and activity! This is a continuation of the incarnation. God becomes flesh as Christ continues to lives in us and through us. Truly, I feel as if we ARE living the name of our school and BEING God’s Heart in our world.
With deep gratitude to each of you for all of your Activity Permeated with Presence! Thank you for being the Face of God to me!
Blessings and Love,
Maureen Glavin, rscj
