Come Away to that Lonely Place
As I was preparing for the seasons of Advent and Christmas, my heart kept leading me to meditate on Christ’s birth in Bethlehem. Too often it is romanticized in a way that the real weight and significance of the story is diminished. The reality is that the circumstances of the story of Bethlehem and the birth of Christ would be most undesirable to any family. Joseph was returning home to his own city with his pregnant wife, Mary, and could find no room for them to stay when she was to give birth to Jesus. They had to settle for a stable, which, in the east, was really just a cave where people kept their livestock. This implies that it had its share of filth. This dark and lonely place is the last place that anyone would want to be.
Bethlehem then symbolizes a spiritual place that we often find ourselves running from, and the fear of being in that place can drive us to do things that we otherwise wouldn’t ever consider doing. In the short time that I’ve been a priest, I’ve seen that many of the sins that people deal with are not really the problem in and of itself, but a reaction to something deeper. So many people get frustrated over committing the same sins over and over, going back to the same vices and returning to the same toxic relationships. Yet, what lies at the heart of the matter is that within us there is a deep fear of that cave of Bethlehem, a deep fear of loneliness that leads us to seek refuge somewhere else; and that is precisely where God willed that Jesus Christ be born.
When the angels appear to the Shepherds, they beckon them to hasten to Bethlehem, and when the Magi set out on their journey to find the King of Kings, the star leads them to that dark and lonely cave. When they all discover Christ there, they leave differently from when they came; the shepherds glorify God and the Magi return by a different way. The Church too, urges us like the angels, to not be afraid, to stop running away and to instead hasten to Bethlehem, that lonely place, to discover that we are not alone, but that ‘God-is-with-us.’ We journey to Bethlehem in the solitude and silence of prayer, and in that quiet, God awakens us to his presence. Christ is there with us, and if he is with us and loves us even when we have been shut out by the rest of the world, in the loneliest of places, then no one can take away our peace.
Christ chose to be born in the loneliness of Bethlehem to assure us of his presence in our loneliness, that we may no longer be afraid of it. That cave in Bethlehem was a place that Jesus loved and, in a way, returned to time and again during his life on earth. He continually sought out that solitude that he was born into, spending nights in prayer alone, because in that solitude he would delight in being in the presence of his Heavenly Father. He even invited his disciples to do the same when he said, “Come away by yourselves to a deserted place and rest for a while.” (Mark 6:31) It’s an invitation that he makes to all of us as his disciples, to return time and again to that lonely place of Bethlehem to find him there waiting for us, that we may then leave changed, glorifying God like the Magi and the Shepherds.
Fr Gabriel, the fourth of six children, was raised in a Catholic family in Framingham, Massachusetts. By the end of high school, he felt a clear calling to the priesthood, though he initially struggled to accept this vocation. Pursuing his dream of studying art, he found himself continually confronted by the question of his vocation. Eventually, Gabriel decided to stop running and went to the Domus Galilee in Israel for a period of discernment. This pivotal decision allowed him to embrace his calling. Father Gabriel was ordained as a priest in May 2024 and is currently serving at the Immaculate Conception Parish in Marlborough, Massachusetts.
