Each year on December 28, as part of the Octave of Christmas, we honor the Feast of the Holy Innocents. According to tradition, this memorializes the children who were killed when King Herod was looking for the Christ Child, and it also harkens back to the legendary first born sons who were killed in Egypt in a failed attempt to destroy Moses.
 
What we know as people of faith is that God works through all things - through human triumphs and tragedies. That is not to say pithily that tragedy is simply "part of God's plan" - God never wants us to suffer and never wills evil to be done just so that He can work through it. But when tragedies do occur, God's goodness is not restrained and the love that He showed in the Incarnation will continue to be shown to all of His children.
 
At tomorrow morning's 8:00am Mass, the intention will be for the children of Connecticut. No sane person can rationalize what the people of a small town in Connecticut have suffered - what our entire nation and world has suffered. I do not claim to have the words of comfort that will make this all okay. I have only human history and Salvation History to which I can point and say that we do not suffer alone. As Phil Steger recently wrote: "The murder of innocents isn't alien to Advent, or Christmas. It's only foreign to the story of Santa Claus and flying reindeer."
 
Last week, I came to the office early on Monday morning, when the young Blessed Trinity Catholic School students were having their Advent Prayer Service. From outside the room where they gathered with their principal and teachers I listened to the comfort that those small voices offered. The voices of those children are the concrete sign of hope and of God's presence that I can point to - I am sure there are other signs in your own life. They had no great theological analysis, but they raised their voices in songs of praise, of waiting and longing for the presence of Christ. And Christ has come - not only into history as the infant Jesus, but into the hearts and lives of us all of us, each day.