Faith, hope, love and Our Lady
A talk given for the Advent Day of recollection by Sr Ann Catherine Swailes
One of the most wonderful things about being human is surely the gift of language, and it's one that perhaps we rather often take for granted. I regularly Skype with a dear friend and former colleague now living in the mid-west of the United States, and I'm in awe of the technology that makes it possible for us to converse as we used to do when we were sitting next to each other in my office in Cambridge. And yet, in a certain sense, the physical distance between us is irrelevant. The very fact that human language can do the job it does at all, that the noises we make with our mouths or the marks we make with ink on paper can communicate such complex concepts and desires, is the real miracle wherever we are. And perhaps it's one we only really notice on those occasions when it doesn't work. I was once working as an au pair for a German family, and was bewildered when the lady of the house told me one morning that we were going to have mice for supper. I spent the day in some trepidation, but at the evening meal nothing more challenging than sweetcorn appeared on the table - for which the German word, is indeed Maiss, clearly, when I was capable of thinking calmly about it, related to the English “maize”. On another occasion, I was utterly baffled by a friend's telling me that there were several labour wards in her part of town, until I realised she was talking, not, as I'd initially assumed, about hospital maternity units, but about voting patterns in local elections.
As it says in the 
4th. Sunday of Advent: Yr. A: In today’s readings, we are reminded three times that He who is to be born is to be called Emmanuel, which means, God-with-us, so perhaps it’s a good idea to remind ourselves how God IS with us and not only, of course, at Christmas.