by Father Maurice Pearce, parish priest at Our Lady of Victories

John the Baptist was a man of great enthusiasm.

He demonstrated this even before he was born.

He leapt for joy in his mother's womb when he was in the presence of Christ, who was in his mother's womb.

It's a strange business this leaping for joy in your mother's womb.

In my very early days, I must have spent some time there, but I can't say I remember much about it.

I wonder if this isn't a good thing, since life in the womb must be a very narrow, confined sort of life, a bit like being in prison.

Sometimes even life outside the womb can be narrow and confined.

Most of us live lives with a lot of routine in them. Perhaps most people do fairly routine jobs. But all of us over time have a sense that our lives are routine.

That things don't change very much. We can feel locked into a very narrow life.

When you feel trapped in a dead end life, it's hard to do much beyond enduring the burden of each day.

It's hard to be enthusiastic when you look ahead and see only a blank wall. Perhaps a future filled with illness, or unemployment, or a job that you hate. Under these circumstances, it's very hard to feel enthusiastic.

Our lives can be narrow and monotonous and dark, but that doesn't stop God from coming into them.

Christ came into precisely such a narrow existence as ours.

He was a human being like you and me.

To be a human being means to live a limited life. But somehow into such a limited life God can fit.

The infinite comes into the finite and makes it infinite.

John the Baptist understood this from an unusually early age.

The presence of Christ in our world gives us cause for joy and opens up new horizons, no matter what our circumstances.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.