Religious Education
This year MACS are celebrating joy. At Holy Rosary we have many joyous occasions coming up in our final days of the 2025 school year.
Joy
We often think about joy as an experience of happiness based on favorable circumstances: a stroke of good luck, a personal achievement, or a long-held desire finally being satisfied. But when joy depends on circumstances, it fades fast when the good times end.
Advent joy is not about general happiness stemming from good times. It’s a deep sense of safety and freedom people feel because of God’s loving character, which remains constant through all circumstances, and because God can be trusted to ultimately bless and heal creation as he promised. Similar to the joy a friend’s presence brings on good days and bad, we experience joy as God walks with us through the fluctuations of life’s positive and painful circumstances.
In the Bible, people express joy both when God delivers them from situations of oppression and while still in the middle of exile, persecution, and pain. As people remember God’s loving, rescuing actions throughout history, they wait in joyful hope for him to act in the future, even when that waiting requires patient suffering.
This kind of joy is about being united with the God who walks with us and trusting that he will one day wipe away every tear. It looks to the future but also takes root in our present reality. The season of Advent invites us to experience joy not because everything is perfect but because God is with us and his joy is already breaking into the world.
Love
Love is often seen as a force beyond our control, something people fall in or out of. Or it may seem like something satisfying that we can achieve, driving us to chase affection through relationships or status. “Love is all you need,” they say, because it’s the path to self-fulfillment.
But something is missing from that picture of love. The Bible invites us to see a kind of love that’s neither accidental nor driven by desire for self-fulfillment. Instead, it involves a steady commitment to care for the well-being of others—never self-seeking, always self-giving—even when it costs us.
Jesus shows this kind of love when he gives his life for friends and enemies alike. Dying on a cross, with his killers still laughing at him, Jesus cares for their well-being as he prays for their forgiveness (Luke 23:34). Living with this kind of love does not mean ignoring our own needs or devaluing ourselves. After all, Jesus says to “love your neighbor as yourself” (Matt. 22:39). But it means choosing to see all people as living miracles of God, each made in God’s image and deeply loved by him.
The Advent season leads us to reflect on the future God is bringing, where every interaction will be shaped and compelled by love. Even more, it invites us to live into that coming world right now by loving others the way Jesus does. As we give of ourselves in order to care for both friends and enemies, we demonstrate the love that Jesus shows to all people.
Sarah, Religious Education Leader