Today is the Feast of the Holy Innocents.

The slaughter of the young boys of Bethlehem is especially difficult for a father to contemplate I have two boys two years old and under. Two of mine would have been massacred under Herod’s order.

But it seems to me today that this feast is about Hope. Just four days ago we celebrated the birth of Hope, the Radiant Dawn, the King of Nations, Emmanuel. However, Hope requires something of us. While our Hope truly is a gift from our Heavenly Father, it is one that requires a response from us and our participation to grow and bear fruit in our lives. A few weeks ago I wrote about Fr. Doran’s homily on the First Sunday of Advent, when he spoke about the silence of God and our need to nurture and cultivate our Hope.

On the Fourth Sunday of Advent, Fr. Doran spoke to us about the Homily of Pope Benedict XVI on the Immaculate Conception, which was very fitting because these two Solemnities had the same Gospel reading. These two paragraphs from Holy Father struck me with particular force:

The human being lives in the suspicion that God's love creates a dependence and that he must rid himself of this dependency if he is to be fully himself. Man does not want to receive his existence and the fullness of his life from God.

He himself wants to obtain from the tree of knowledge the power to shape the world, to make himself a god, raising himself to God's level, and to overcome death and darkness with his own efforts. He does not want to rely on love that to him seems untrustworthy; he relies solely on his own knowledge since it confers power upon him. Rather than on love, he sets his sights on power, with which he desires to take his own life autonomously in hand. And in doing so, he trusts in deceit rather than in truth and thereby sinks with his life into emptiness, into death.

Linking these various threads together: the Nativity, Herod’s slaughter of innocents, the necessity to cultivate Hope and the mistrust of God in preference to personal power, we can see what this day teaches about Hope. Herod’s response to the Hope offered by Christ is to exercise his own personal power in a terrifying way. By his horrifying response, Herod teaches us that hope and power are opposites. Trust is the proper response to Hope. Trust is the activity of cultivating Hope, and in trusting we abandon ourselves and we give our lives over to Another, and this is the activity that bring us to the Cross.

One Other Thing…..about today. It is good in these times when illegal immigration is so much discussed and poor families have become the object of so much contempt for daring to seek some method of providing for themselves in America that we remember that the Holy Family in their flight to Egypt were uninvited by their hosts, were poor and without a means to support themselves, and were fugitives from the justice of Herod, the legitimate ruler of Judea. How much better it would be if we saw in every illegal immigrant the reflection of the Holy Family.