Dear Friends in Christ: Dec 25, 06

Feast of Christmas, 9AM

What happened at the first Christmas is unspeakably mysterious and goes beyond imagination: God began feeling hungry, thirsty, cold, needy, weak, despised, dissatisfied. God began experiencing the condition of a creature inside a world, which had fallen away from the goodness of its nature. God loved the world so much that he began identifying with this creature lost in the realm of the senses, compulsions and instincts. Not that God identified with either error or evil, not that the eternal Son had ever abandoned his unity with the Father, not that he had left the bosom of the Father, the intimate community of knowledge and love with the everlasting Absolute. But he undertook a human destiny, made himself the subject of suffering, became not only mortal, but became a victim of suffering and death.

The journey he began in Bethlehem is the starting point of mankind’s journey back to the Father. By this I do not mean that before the time of Christ no human being had a chance to reach communion with God, but that all our ability to reach out beyond this life comes from God’s saving will made manifest in Bethlehem.

That all this was unlikely to happen is beyond question. The gift is enormous. If we want to understand it before we accept it, we would remain standing here with open mouths, never ready to take God’s challenge and embrace it. We ought to look at the infant in swaddling clothes as an image of our misery displayed for the sake of offering us hope. After several and repeated attempts of communicating with us, --- after having spoken to us in all sorts of different ways -- God made a last attempt by which to convince us that mortality, our bodily nature exposed to so much suffering, is not a curse, but our greatest resource, our greatest asset. In the middle of a world trying to invent ways and means by which suffering can be avoided, God teaches us that our greatest treasure is our capacity of suffering and dying. Yes! He became a child not in order to remain a child but in order to go through all pains of growing up, all efforts and pains of carrying out the will of the Father in a world not willing to listen and to communicate, and finally to be victimized, to fail in his mission, to be rejected and to die. Throughout his journey he cries out in loud voice: do not be afraid! Don’t be afraid of meeting setbacks and even failures, don’t be afraid of experiencing privation, physical and emotional pain, do not be afraid of being judged and misunderstood, do not be afraid of being rejected, condemned or eliminated. Turn all these into various station of your way of the cross, itself a journey on which we can join the only begotten Son on his journey into the glory of the Father. The way your destiny is shaped is a customized way of salvation designed for you: it has been individually intended for you. The divine will comes to you today again in the form of a child in swaddling clothes: a crying baby reduced into helplessness, bound by our condition of mortality and yet with a task of liberating and saving us from the burden and the fear of mortality.

But realize the purity of the scene, just as well. In this child there is no sin, in the mother there is not a trace of the selfish children of Eve reaching out for the forbidden fruits and wanting to become like god, in full self-determination and complete emancipation. What Mary offers us in Bethlehem is the fruit from the true tree of life. The tree is the cross. It might look hideous and shameful, but its fruit is invigorating: take and eat, this is my body given for the life of the world, this is my blood poured out for your salvation. Mary knows that the child she holds in her arms is immensely more that any woman can produce and transmit. She offers us the fruit of everlasting life. When we receive the Eucharist, we share the flesh and blood born from her, but a life infinitely more powerful than what is born of mere flesh, of human instinct to propagate life indefinitely on this earth.

We tell the Lord today that we are grateful for his coming in the flesh, that we appreciate his being wrapped in swaddling clothes, wrapped in the misery of our condition, transforming our death-oriented existence into a tool of redemption and liberation. We accept Mary’s way of life: a life based on humility and obedience. May it be done according to the Word, according to the Word made flesh, according to the divine truth capable to elevate this passing existence into a seed of eternity.

Let us wish each other a Christmas blessed with a vision, capable to embrace every dimension of human existence. Not only the cry and the laughter, for we usually refer to the opposite emotions of our hearts: the doubt and the anguish, the seemingly senseless and monotonous efforts, the constantly renewed beginnings of repeated effort, the trial-and-error sequences, yes and even the mixed success-and-failure successes of daily life. The greatest challenge of our culture so absorbed with the worries of a passing life is to summon our courage and continue to see in the face of the baby of Bethlehem, the face of the crucified man on Golgotha, and the shining fact of the transfigured and glorious Lord.

If we made it to Bethlehem with the shepherds and the magi, if we heard the chant of the angels at the birth, then we should stay with Mary and the Child and learn a life in which, due to faith and obedience, there is more glory to God, more peace on earth, more readiness to live for God and become an instrument of his peace.