The power of God’s call is not a reward for the perfect, but a summons for the willing.

The first truth we must grasp is that God does not show partiality.

No matter who you are, or where you have been, you are the beloved of God.

When we look at the stories of the Bible, we see a gallery of the “unqualified” according to world standards.

God chose them, prepared them, and then sent them out into the harvest.

Their backgrounds were messy, their status was low, and their standing was often compromised.

Think of the tax collectors like Matthew, the prostitutes like Rahab, the murderers like Moses, and the doubters like Thomas.

The list goes on: sinners, saints, kings, and outcasts.

They were all chosen, and they were all prepared for a specific purpose.

There is a divine reason why God chooses the broken and the overlooked.

It is because they can understand others better; they have walked the dusty roads of failure and know the scent of shame.

Because they have been mended, they know how to handle the shattered pieces of another person’s soul.

This unique preparation leads to a specific charge, which we hear in the soaring words of the prophet Isaiah.

“Thus says God, the Lord, who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread out the earth and what comes from it...”

“...who gives breath to the people upon it and spirit to those who walk in it.”

The One who holds the cosmos also holds your specific, fragile life.

“I am the Lord, I have called you in righteousness, I have taken you by the hand and kept you.”

“I have given you as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations.”

This is not a call to sit in a comfortable pew, but a call to be a “covenant” for others.

God’s chosen ones are sent “to open the eyes that are blind, to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, from the prison those who sit in darkness.”

As the poet Mary Oliver once asked, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

God answers that question by pointing us toward those who sit in darkness.

We see this most clearly in the baptism of Jesus, where the heavens open and a voice declares, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased” (Matthew 3:17).

Jesus did not wait until he had performed miracles to be called beloved; he was beloved before he ever started his ministry.

You, too, are chosen and beloved before you “do” anything for the kingdom.

The late Henri Nouwen wrote, “Being the beloved expresses the core truth of our existence.”

If we don’t believe we are beloved, we will try to use our call to prove our worth.

But when we know we are chosen, we can give our glory back to the One who called us.

As Isaiah reminds us, “I am the Lord, that is my name; my glory I give to no other, nor my praise to idols.”

God is doing a new thing in you, even if you feel like you are still standing in the old wreckage.

“See, the former things have come to pass, and new things I now declare; before they spring forth, I tell you of them.”

You are called to be a light to the nations precisely because you know what it feels like to be in the dark.

Your scars are your credentials.

Your past is the soil in which God is planting a new future.

The world may see a sinner or a failure, but God sees a light-bearer.

Do not be afraid of your brokenness, for it is the crack where the light gets in.

Walk out into the world knowing you are taken by the hand by the Creator of the heavens.

Open the eyes of the blind with your kindness.

Bring out the prisoners with your compassion.

Be the beloved community that God intended from the beginning.

Amen.

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When Christmas approaches, my family and friends often ask the same question: “Jos, what do you want this year?”

They know me well. They know I have no use for trinkets or things that gather dust. I am a man of utility and simple rhythms. So, I tell them the truth. Give me a box of tea candles. Give me some snacks from the Indian grocery store—maybe some spicy murukku or sweet ladoos. If you want to make them yourself, even better.

The snacks are for the body, but the tea candles? They are for my soul.

Every morning, the rhythm is the same. I wake up. I brush my teeth. I wash the sleep from my face. My body starts its trek toward the kitchen, toward the coffee pot. It is the destination we all seek in the early gray of the morning.

But before I reach the coffee, I make a mandatory stop. On my wall, there is a small sacred space. It is a simple circle—an image of Our Lady of Lourdes. This is where the tea candle finds its purpose.

I strike a match. I watch the wick catch. I say nothing.

Most days, it is just a ritual of centering. I stand there in the silence before the world starts screaming for my attention. I look at her, and I find my core. Occasionally, I speak the names of my children. I don’t get to see them daily, but in that flickering light, they are right there with me. I pray for my wife. I pray for my family. I name the people in my church and those who have sent me frantic texts asking for a “word with God.”

But then, I do something that has become the most important part of my day. I say the names of those I have hurt.

I never wake up with the intention to cause pain. I want to be the best version of myself for this world. I want to build, to care, to love. But I am human. I fail. Sometimes I say things without thinking them through. I get caught up in the momentum of that moment, and I leave a sting behind. It is a sad. Really. But it is my reality.

So, I stand before the Blessed Mother, and I say, “I am sorry for the pain I caused.” I place that burden in the flame.

Then, I turn the coin. I say a word for those who hurt me.

I am learning something as I get older: they are just like me. They didn’t mean to hurt me, either. They got caught up in their own emotions. They were drowning in their own experiences, their own bad days, their own private storms. They acted out of their own “caught-up-ness.”

I choose to let it go.

I don’t do this for them. I do it for me. I do it because when I let go, my heart feels lighter. My mind becomes a clear pool instead of a muddy swamp. My spirit becomes... light.

Saint Francis de Sales once said:

“The person who possesses Christian liberty has no other property than the spirit of God. If we are truly free, we do not care if we are corrected or ignored, for we only seek to be right with the Divine.”

That is what that little tea candle represents for me—liberty. The freedom to not carry yesterday’s grudges or yesterday’s guilt into today’s coffee. I am reminded of a few lines from the poet Mary Oliver:

Every day I see or hear something that more or less kills me with delight, that leaves me like a needle in the haystack of light. It was what I was born for — to look, to listen, ... to lose myself inside this soft world — to be empty and filled.

I found this morning ritual of candle lighting is nothing other than a way to slow me down a bit. I wonder sometimes where I am going with this practice. I wonder if there is anything truly profound in it, or if it is just the habit of an old man.

It doesn’t matter finally, I’ve realized. After all, the Blessed Mother of Lourdes didn’t count my actions or my rituals. She doesn’t need a perfect prayer. She just wants me to be there—faithfully and every day. I am at peace with that. I am empty, I am filled, and then, I go make the coffee.

--------------------

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Last night, I returned to Elie Wiesel’s Night—that searing testament to the Holocaust, that chronicle of unspeakable suffering witnessed through the eyes of a boy who lost everything. Forty million souls caught in humanity’s darkest hour.

Among the book’s many haunting passages, one phrase pierces through: “Clench your teeth and wait.”

This advice came to young Elie when the anger, pain, and struggle of the Jews in Germany reached its crescendo. An inmate offered these words as counsel, as comfort, perhaps as the only wisdom left when the world has abandoned reason. Clench your teeth and wait. Endure. Survive. This too shall pass.

But I find myself asking: should we simply clench our teeth and wait?

There was a woman on the train to Auschwitz. She cried out all day, and the others grew irritated. They thought her mad, hallucinating. “I see fire! I see fire!” she screamed into the suffocating darkness of the cattle car.

Her fellow prisoners wanted her to stop, to be quiet, to not disturb what little peace they could manufacture in their terror. Then they arrived. The crematoriums blazed. Bodies burned. There was the fire she had foreseen—the fire no one else could see until it was too late.

I think of her often now. I see signs.

Not to the extent of Nazi Germany—not yet, perhaps never. But I see patterns, and they are deeply uncomfortable. I smell the fear of those forced to carry documents to prove their right to exist in places they’ve called home. I feel the anger and trauma of those afraid to speak against atrocities. I hear the silence of those who witness the unlawful treatment, the deportations, the deaths at sea. I see the loss of freedom to speak, the fear that keeps people inside their homes.

James Baldwin wrote, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” Yet I watch as we collectively refuse to face, what is unfolding before us. I see the struggle of good leaders, trying to become great leaders, their voices caught in their throats. Even presidents remain quiet. For a long time, I believed they knew better than I did—that their silence meant they understood something I couldn’t grasp. Now I realize they are as afraid as I am.

I see a judiciary that claims to correct past wrongs, while falling into the same patterns of lies and deceit that corrupted the courts of Nazi Germany, Stalin’s Russia, and Maduro’s Venezuela. The list grows longer.

Margaret Atwood reminds us in The Handmaid’s Tale: “Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it.” This is the truth I cannot escape. It happens slowly, then all at once. Overnight, people are rounded up. Citizens deported within twenty-four hours. Then the news cycle moves on, and we fall into complacency, because our memories are short, and our capacity for horror is limited.

It happened to the Jews this way—slowly, methodically, lawfully for those who didn’t fall into the targeted class. It didn’t affect them, so they couldn’t see. It was for those people. People without faces. People who weren’t friends. Someone convinced the “normal” class that nothing would happen to them—only to those who looked different, talked different, believed different, those who didn’t fall in line with what the leader demanded.

W.H. Auden, understood this pattern when he wrote in “September 1, 1939”:

“I and the public know

What all schoolchildren learn,

Those to whom evil is done

Do evil in return.”

Like the woman on that train to Auschwitz, I find myself crying out: “I see fire. I see fire.”

Even writing these words frightens me. I have no criminal record, no pattern of dangerous behavior. But when power consolidates, when truth becomes negotiable, these facts can be erased and rewritten. A man wrongly deported suddenly becomes a human trafficker in official records.

A young girl arrested becomes a national threat, because she wrote in a university journal her views about atrocities in Gaza. A child brought here as an infant becomes a criminal for lacking papers. The machinery of injustice works efficiently once it begins turning.

I could fill pages with examples, but today my intention is simpler: to say aloud what I see. To refuse the comfort of silence. To be the woman on the train, however unwelcome her message may be.

I pray that these are merely my own fevered imaginings. I pray that I am delusional, paranoid, wrong. I pray that the patterns I perceive will dissolve into nothing more than anxious speculation. But history teaches us that the woman who saw fire was not mad—she was prophetic.

So I keep trusting that God remains present in the midst of suffering, as He was for the Jews, the Arabs, the Mexicans, the poor around the world. I pray for goodness and mercy to prevail. I pray for kindness to resurface in hardened hearts. I pray we might yet become, as Dr. King envisioned, the Beloved Community.

But I will not clench my teeth and wait in silence.

I see fire.

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“I want Greenland. I want Venezuela.”

Whether it is a literal island, a neighbor’s oil, a distant water source, or the very autonomy of other human beings, the cry of the powerful remains the same across the centuries. We live in a world where we always seem to want more than we need. We have given it many names—colonialism, manifest destiny, national interest, economic security—but beneath the polished vocabulary of statecraft lies a very old and very simple sin: Greed.

Greed is the act of coveting what belongs to another. It is the restless energy that looks across a border or a fence and decides that “what is mine is not enough.” This human desire to possess what is not ours has existed since the beginning. It is why the Ten Commandments explicitly warn us: “Neither shall you covet your neighbor’s wife; and you shall not desire your neighbor’s house, his field, or his male servant, or his female servant, his ox, or his donkey, or anything that is your neighbor’s” (Deuteronomy 5:21).

The rich and the powerful will always find a way to justify their hunger. They will wrap it in theology, dress it in economic necessity, or mask it behind financial projections. This is not a problem unique to one president or one nation. We see it in the halls of power in Washington, Moscow, Beijing, and New Delhi. The list goes on, but the story is always the same: the strong devouring the weak.

I am reminded of the story of King David and Naboth’s vineyard, or even more poignantly, the parable told to David by the Prophet Nathan after the King had taken what did not belong to him. Nathan spoke of a rich man with many flocks who took the single, beloved ewe lamb of a poor neighbor just to feed a traveler. When David grew angry at the injustice, Nathan leveled the finger of truth: “You are the man!” (2 Samuel 12:7).

Wars do not start for the well-being of others. Let no one fool us. When a nation is invaded, or a smaller people group is absorbed, it is not an act of charity; it is an act of theft. From the Old Testament stories of capturing tribal lands to the conquests of Alexander and Caesar, to the Popes and Kings of the Middle Ages who carved up the world in God’s name—it is all a fraud. We either stand with the fraudster or we stand with the Truth.

Why are we so greedy? Why are we not satisfied with the abundance within us—the unique, God-given soul that no one can ever steal? We are truly rich only when we care for those who need love. Material possessions are not transformational; they cannot change the rhythm of a heart.

The Bible is clear on the cruelty of this path: “He who oppresses the poor to increase his wealth and he who gives gifts to the rich—both come only to poverty” (Proverbs 22:16).

In the Middle Ages, the poet Dante Alighieri envisioned the greedy in the Divine Comedy, forced to push heavy weights against one another, forever trapped by the very things they sought to possess. St. Thomas Aquinas warned us that greed is a “sin against God, just as all mortal sins, in as much as man condemns things eternal for the sake of things temporal.”

I wonder, what if we stopped looking at “Greenland” and started looking at the person beside us? What if we realized that when we take what is not ours, we lose the only thing that actually matters—our own integrity?

I pray that we find the courage to be satisfied. I pray we find the strength to protect the “ewe lambs” of our neighbors. In the end, we take nothing with us but the love we gave away.

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The Day of Epiphany is often celebrated as a feast of pure radiance—the “Great Manifestation” of a star so bright it pulled men across deserts. We are taught that light makes life easy; it reveals the path, clarifies the destination, and fuels our imagination. But as I look at the stars in my own life, I’ve begun to realize that the light is only half the story. There is a profound, necessary imagination that can only be found in the darkness.

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I find myself wondering about the Magi. We focus on the star, but they spent the vast majority of their journey in the dark. They traveled by night, after all. The light was their guide, but the darkness was their container. It was in the cold, silent expanses of the desert night that their hope had to mature.

A good life, I’ve discovered, is not the absence of shadows, but a mixture of light and dark moments. It is the awareness that both are required to truly experience “seeing.” Without the velvet backdrop of the night, the star is invisible. Without the struggle of the journey, the arrival has no weight. The Magi didn’t just find light at the end of a tunnel; they found a way to let the light and the dark work together to bring them to the Divine.

It is easy to cast Herod as the personification of pure darkness, the villain of the Epiphany story. He was a man consumed by the fear of losing power, planning the unthinkable to protect his throne. Yet, as I reflect personally, I have to admit that Herod lives in me, too. We all struggle with moments of jealousy, possessiveness, and the urge to “kill” the things that threaten our ego or our comfort.

Does this mean I am devoid of light? I don’t think so. Even Herod was aware of the prophecy; he was aware of the “King of the Jews.” He saw the light of the Magi’s arrival, but he tried to weaponize it. My own struggle with the darkness within is not a sign of failure, but a sign of my humanity. The theologian Paul Tillich once wrote, “The light of the eternal shines through the darkness of the temporal, but the darkness does not comprehend it.” I feel this tension constantly—the eternal light of God shining through my very temporal, very flawed shadows.

I used to think that the goal of the spiritual life was to eliminate the dark, to reach a state of perpetual noon. But I now see that such a life would be blinding and flat. To enjoy the light, I must respect the dark. The darkness is where the seeds germinate; the light is what calls them toward the surface.

My personal wonderment today is that God chose to manifest in a world that was—and is—deeply dark. The Epiphany isn’t about the light winning a war against the night; it’s about the light being born into the night. It is about the courage to keep walking when the star is obscured by clouds, trusting that the “God within” is holding both the shadow and the flame. I am learning to stop fearing my own dark moments and instead see them as the very places where the imagination of God is most active, preparing me for the next dawn.

Love

Bishop Jos

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I was a child, maybe four or five years old, when I first met her. The Blessed Mother of Lourdes. I was a tiny member of the Sodality of Mary, wearing a ribbon that felt far too grand.

I didn’t know what that was for or why! Ha. But it was amazing. We stood before the grotto, a cool place of stone and shadow. We prayed like a bullet train—Hail Mary’s rushing past like heavy wind. The scent of beeswax and the blue of her sash were etched into my mind. A permanent, gentle mark. That smell and color, still create calmness.

I have never been a fanatic. Nothing in this world is so perfect that I can’t live without it. I have never sought the loud or the dramatic in my faith. But in times when the world feels sharp and loud, my feet find the old path. In moments of anxiety, I find myself back at the grotto. Wherever I am, I look for a candle. I strike a match, and the small flame dances. I stare at the candle. I say the Hail Mary, and the frantic speed of the world begins to slow. My heart finds its rhythm again. My spirit finds a soft place to land.

Now, years later, I am evaluating these quiet practices. I share them with folks who look to me for wisdom. I ask myself: Why do I do this? I don’t have a complex theological map. I don’t have a lecture prepared on the mechanics of intercession. The honest truth is much simpler: It calms my nerves. It gives me a center to hold on to. Life is chaotic most of the time, but with this moment at the inner grotto, I have learned to manage it.

Every morning, I have a ritual. A sacred spot with the image of the Mother of Lourdes on the wall at home—a tiny island of peace in a sea of emails and appointments, there I light a candle. I watch the smoke curl upward like a silent thought. I stand there for a few seconds. I ask for nothing. I don’t even “pray” in the way people expect a Bishop to pray. I just stare at the dancing candle. I stare at her gentle face, bathed in the glow. Occasionally, I whisper to the silence. “Blessed Mother, I am anxious.” “Mother, I am worried today.” “Blessed Mother, I simply don’t know what to do.”

Then I move on into the day. I pass that altar several times. Each time, I leave a few words behind like petals. “That was a stressful meeting.” “I don’t know why he said that.” “I don’t know why I feel this way.” I don’t dare to judge anyone, because I don’t know the secrets of their hearts. Heavens, I barely know the secrets of my own.

I have come to a place where I don’t want to analyze. I just want to acknowledge. The Blessed Mother is the perfect listener. She is like the moon—reflecting a greater light, steady and quiet. She doesn’t talk back. She doesn’t offer feedback or a list of things to fix. She simply lets me hear myself.

And most of the time? That is the greatest mercy. I need to hear my own words in the air. I need to feel how small a worry becomes when it is placed in her lap. In the stillness of her presence, my own noise turns into music.

My devotion from age four to now is a simple thread. I don’t always know what I am asking. But I know I am standing in her light. I know she is watching over me with a mother’s patient eye. What else does a child of God really need?

I think of St. Bernadette, who saw the Lady in the hollow of the rock. She was a child of simple grace, and she once said:

“I shall do everything for Heaven, my true home. There I shall find my Mother in all the splendor of her glory.”

I don’t need the splendor yet. I pray I never need it. I am happy with the candle-light. I am happy with the quiet corner. I choose to let my religion be a soft place to rest. A mother who listens while I find my way home.

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If someone came to me today with a claim as outrageous as the one Gabriel brought to Mary, I suspect my first instinct would be to check my pulse or look for the exit. To be told that the impossible is not only possible but is currently taking root inside of you—at a time when such a thing meant social exile or worse—is a terrifying proposition. Yet, as I sit with her story, I realize that Mary’s “yes” didn’t start with the angel. It started with a lifetime of listening to the silence within herself.

I often find myself caught in the struggle of trusting the “God within.” We are conditioned to look for the Divine in the spectacular, the external, or the historically sanctioned. We look for God in books, in cathedrals, or in the advice of others. But Mary’s motherhood demands a different kind of orientation. She had to trust her inner being first. She had to believe in the resonance of her own soul before she could believe the words of the messenger standing before her.

For me, this is the most daunting part of the spiritual journey: the call to self-awareness. To be truly aware of God within is to acknowledge a presence that is more intimate than my own breath, yet often more foreign than a stranger. It requires me to trust my own intuition—that deep, quiet hum of “this is true”—even when the logic of the world shouts that it is “outrageous.”

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I wonder at the weight of that internal alignment. Mary brought the Son of God into the world not because she was a passive recipient of a divine decree, but because she was an active participant who trusted her inner landscape. She owned her agency. She felt the stirrings of the Infinite in the center of her own humanity and decided that her internal reality was more authoritative than the external expectations of her culture.

The contemporary poet Denise Levertov captures this beautifully in her poem, The Annunciation:

“She was not chosenbecause she wasmore naive than the rest of us...

She was chosen becauseshe was able to sayYes.”

That “Yes” is what I am seeking in my own life. It is the power that comes when I stop outsourcing my faith and start inhabiting it. When I look at Mary, I see a woman who dared to believe that her inner self was a fit temple for the Creator.

There is a staggering power in that level of self-trust. When I finally stop doubting the “still small voice” and treat my inner stirrings as holy, I begin to realize that I, too, am called to bring something of the Divine into the world. It may not be the Savior of mankind, but it is a unique expression of Light that only I can carry. The struggle to trust God within is really the struggle to believe that I am worthy of such an indwelling. Mary’s life is the radical proof that we are.

I often ask myself, “do I trust my inner landscape?”

I often find myself wondering, “if I could say YES when asked.”

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Thirty-one years. It is a span of time that feels both like a single indrawn breath and a vast, uncharted continent I have spent a lifetime traversing. Today, I find myself sitting in the quiet, recalling my ordination.

I am not looking back to extract a lesson or to offer a theological explanation of the priesthood. Instead, I am simply sitting with the wonder of it all—marveling at the staggering depth of what I did not know, the distance I have traveled, and the quiet, persistent grace that has held me together when I felt myself coming apart.

The memory begins in the pre-dawn darkness. I remember the drive from Bishop Joseph Kundukulam’s house. It was a sixteen-mile journey that took over an hour, a slow procession through the waking world. The silence in the car was heavy, charged with an electricity I couldn’t quite name. With every mile, the anticipation tightened in my chest. When we finally approached the village, the world seemed to burst into color and sound. People lined the streets, a living corridor of faith. We paused repeatedly to receive their blessings through the car window. Even then, a mile from the church, the weight of their expectations began to settle on me.

When we finally stepped out of the car at the entrance to the church property, the air was thick with the scent of jasmine from the garlands placed around our necks. A children’s band played, their notes bright and slightly out of tune, and a thousand faces turned toward us. It was grand—undeniably grand—but oh, how heavy that grandness felt on my young shoulders. I felt like a small boat being launched into a sea far too vast for its hull.

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I look back at my parents, seated at the front. They were the only two given chairs, a mark of honor that, in that moment, felt like a separation. I can still see their faces: the shimmering pride, the genuine happiness, and something else—a shadow I didn’t have the vocabulary for then, but which I recognize now as grief.

It was the gentle, holy grief of letting go. The old saying echoed in the chambers of my mind: “A priest is lost to the family, but gained to the world.” I saw my mother’s eyes and realized that, in her heart, she was performing her own sacrifice. The Franciscan nuns moved through the crowd with meticulous care, ensuring every ritual detail was perfect. But as I stood there, the center of all that perfection, I felt profoundly, terrifyingly far from perfect.

St. John of the Cross once wrote,

“In the evening of life, we will be judged on love alone.”

On that Friday morning, I had no idea what love would eventually cost me. I only knew the immediate weight: the hopes of a community, the traditions of the Church, and my own paralyzing sense of inadequacy.

When Fr. Raphael Thattil—now the Major Archbishop—stood to preach, his words cut through the ceremony like a bell.

“Jos is no more yours,” he declared. “He belongs to the Lord forever, and he is called to serve the world for Him.”

I watched my mother cry, and I felt his words settle into my soul like stones dropped into deep, dark water. They didn’t float; they sank, changing the topography of my inner self forever.

The moment of consecration remains etched in my spirit. As I held the bread and wine for the first time, I cried in my heart. The burden felt unbearable. Lord, what does this mean? Where are you taking me? Am I prepared for this? A legion of fears gathered around that altar. I was too naive to know the specific trials that lay ahead—the dark nights, the institutional struggles, the personal failures—and perhaps that was a mercy.

Thomas Merton’s wisdom comes to me now, forty-five years into this calling:

“We do not want to be beginners. But let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything else but beginners, all our life!”

How true those words have proven to be. Even now, I am still learning. I am still stumbling. I am still beginning.

Looking back, I am struck by how utterly unprepared I was. I was unprepared for the days when the silence of God would feel like a deafening roar. I was unprepared for the moments when I would question the very foundations of my belief. There were so many times when I simply did not know what I was doing, when I could only hold onto a thin, frayed thread of hope that this path was indeed what God intended.

Yet, thirty-one years later, I am more convinced than ever. Not because of any achievement, nor because I have found all the answers, but because I see the world’s brokenness—and my own—so much more clearly. In that shared woundedness, I have discovered a God who does not demand a polished vessel, but a cracked one that lets the light through.

I understand now that I am not called to be a paragon of perfection. I am called to love—daily, imperfectly, and as honestly as I can manage. St. Teresa of Ávila’s words, “Christ has no body now but yours,” used to frighten me with their responsibility. Now, they comfort me. This broken body, these uncertain hands, this weary heart—this is enough.

What gives me peace today is the simple, liberating truth: I cannot do it “right” by the world’s standards. But I am doing the right thing by continuing to say yes. It is alright that I stumbled. It is alright that I doubted. It is alright that fear walked beside me for three decades.

Julian of Norwich promised that “All shall be well.” I am finally learning to trust this, not as a shallow optimism, but as a deep, tectonic truth. God’s love holds everything—the failures, the confusion, and the moments I felt most lost.

Thirty-one years. The grand ceremony of that Friday morning has morphed into the quiet, daily walk of a servant. The unbearable burden has, by some mystery of grace, become a gift I am deeply grateful to carry. Thank you, Lord, for calling someone as unprepared as I was. Thank you for the journey I could never have imagined. Thank you for teaching me, slowly and patiently, that being a beginner is not a stage to pass through, but a holy place to dwell.

I am still learning.

I am still beginning.

And finally, that is enough.

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These days, when I prepare for a journey, I find myself packing for days. I worry about the details—do I have my documents? Is my house in order? We are a people of preparation. We like to know the “where” and the “how.” In a way we are an advent people as a whole.

Two thousand years ago, a young couple, Joseph and Mary, were doing exactly what we do. They were law-abiding, kindhearted, and obedient. They had enough with them for the trip. They were traveling to Bethlehem because a census had been called. On the surface, a census is an ancient and practical thing. It is how we know who is who, where they come from, and what they do. But beneath the surface of that decree by Caesar Augustus was something far more cynical and cold: it was an accounting of bodies for the sake of empire.

It started slowly. It started with a list.

We have seen this before in the mirrors of history. Before forty million lives were lost in the nightmare of the Second World War, there was a census. Names were noted. Histories were documented. People walked gently into those moments, reporting to authorities, believing that if they followed the rules, everything would be alright. They showed up to the courts and the stations just as Mary and Joseph showed up to Bethlehem—innocent, following the law of the land.

But as the Magi learned, and as we have learned through the centuries, the census is often the precursor to the consolidation of power. When a ruler feels the ground of their authority shake, they do not reach for kindness; they reach for control. They seek to ascertain the livelihoods of the people so they can better grip the throat of the nation.

We see this pattern in the ghosts of the past—in the shadows of Hitler, Saddam Hussein, and Idi Amin. And if we are honest, if we are truly awake, we see it in the “strongmen” of our own day. We see the same hunger for selfishness in leaders who look more like Herod than like servants. We see it in the actions of those like Putin, Orban, and others who equate leadership with the removal of hurdles and the silencing of threats.

I will tell you plainly: I am scared to say these words to you today. I am afraid for myself, for my family, and for the friends I hold dear. We live in a world where power-mongers are once again hunting the vulnerable. We are closer to those dark times than we have been in generations.

See, Christmas is not about a white-bearded man sitting in a plush chair saying “Ho, ho, ho.” That is a comfortable distraction. The real Christmas is a radical, uncomfortable truth. It is the story of a Child who was a prisoner of the war against selfishness and brutality before he could even speak.

Jesus did not come to a palace. He did not come with an army to dismantle the legions of Rome. He came as a “weakling” child, a helpless infant laid in a manger among mute and innocent animals. He came to a world that was—and is—broken and lost.

The power of the Baby in the manger is not the power of the sword; it is the power over your heart. It is the power over your dreams and your hopes. The tyrants of this world can take your livelihood, they can take your country, and they can even take your life—but they cannot take the Christ who dwells in the courage of those who stand up for what is true.

As poet and mystic Rumi once wrote:

“The lion who breaks the enemy’s ranks is a minor hero compared to the lion who overcomes himself.”

The leaders of this world are busy trying to overcome the “enemy” or the “foreigner,” but they have failed to overcome their own greed. Their end is written in the very scriptures they often pretend to honor.

The Bible warns us in the book of James:

“Now listen, you people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming on you... Your gold and silver are corroded. Their corrosion will testify against you and eat your flesh like fire.” (James 5:1, 3)

The consolidation of earthly power is a vapor. It’s a mist. It vanishes. But the “powerlessness” of the manger—the goodness that refuses to hate, the love that refuses to be silent—that is eternal.

I think of the words of Dorothy Day, a servant of the poor and the immigrant, who said:

“The Gospel takes away our right to forever complain about the world. We must simply work to change it; we must help the few who are near us.”

My dear sisters and brothers, let us wake up! Let us see that Jesus came at a time when leaders were selfish, angry, and scared of God. Let us look at the families today who have no place to lay their heads, the children separated from parents by cruel decrees, and let us recognize the Christ at the borders of Egypt, Gaza, El Salvador, Mexico, but they are all too far, let us get a little closer: America.

True leadership is not found in the palaces of the powerful; it is found in the manger of the marginalized. This Christmas, let your heart be the place where that “weak” and “helpless” power is born. Do not be afraid to speak. Do not be afraid to love. For the light is to be born from darkness. Darkness is pregnant with light, waiting to be born. Darkness—no matter how many names it takes or how much power it consolidates—has not, and will not, overcome it.

I wish you a Blessed and Merry Christmas, where Christ will be seen and heard, for he is around you in the weak, the lost, the scared, the immigrant, and the vulnerable! Merry Christmas.

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These days, I don’t find myself thinking much about heaven or hell. That surprises me. There was a time when those ideas felt urgent, even central, but now they seem distant—almost like echoes from another season of faith. What occupies my mind instead is the question of why they no longer hold my attention. I think about that more than I think about heaven or hell themselves.

Perhaps it is because my heart has become deeply attached to the people who are here, now. My energy, my concern, my love are invested in those whose faces I see, whose struggles I know, whose joys and burdens unfold in ordinary time. I don’t feel built to carry the emotionally charged finalities of life when the unfinished, fragile realities of today already ask so much of me. What matters most seems to be right in front of me.

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Sometimes I wonder if this is why Jesus came at all. Not to pull our imaginations away from earth, but to step fully into it. Not to offer escape, but presence. I don’t know how to describe the incarnation in precise theological terms. Whether it was a “trip” from heaven to earth or something far more mysterious, I know this much: it was beyond my understanding, and it was for us. No one seemed excluded from his coming. No one was too insignificant, too broken, too ordinary.

What I notice when I read the Gospels is how focused Jesus was on the people around him. He noticed hunger, illness, grief, isolation. He paid attention to who was overlooked and who had learned to look away. Occasionally, he spoke about the afterlife—as if to catch attention, to awaken imagination—but that was never his main emphasis. More often, he acted. He fed the hungry. He healed the sick. He touched the untouchable. He sat with sinners. He noticed widows. He gave water to the thirsty. He spoke of visiting those in prison, but even more than speaking, he lived as if every human life deserved dignity and care.

It seems to me that people were rarely interested in what he said about caring for others unless something extraordinary happened first. A miracle. A sign. A moment that jolted them awake. Then, for a brief moment, they listened. And yet Jesus didn’t stay long enough to bask in their attention. He slipped away from crowds. He avoided applause. He resisted being turned into a spectacle.

I find myself wondering why. Was he an introvert, overwhelmed by attention? Or was it something deeper—that public opinion simply didn’t matter to him? Maybe he wasn’t concerned with how his actions were received, only with whether they were right. He did what love required when he could, and then he moved on. No explanations. No concern for how he would be judged. No need to manage his image.

These thoughts come to me in the quiet of early morning, when I sit alone on my couch before the day begins. It is my favorite part of the day. Silence gives me permission to wander. My mind goes in many directions, sometimes without landing anywhere. I don’t come away with answers, and I’m not sure I’m even making sense most of the time. But the thinking itself feels like a gift.

In that quiet space, I invite myself to live with the same attentiveness. To worry less about distant outcomes and more about present faithfulness. To care deeply for those in front of me. To do what is right when I can, and to walk away without needing affirmation. I may not know exactly what all of this means, but I know it matters. And for now, that feels like enough.

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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit bishopjos.substack.com