[attach id=300531 size="medium"]Byzantine icon of the Nativity. Photo: Ricardo André Frantz[/attach]
Most people feel that commercialism is the main obstacle to experience the true spirit of Christmas. I tend to differ. The real stumbling block is lack of belief, lack of inner preparation, and deafness to the Word of God. Only those who can truly wait will be with eyes wide open to see the marvellous glory of God revealed in human nature.
We cannot reflect on Christmas without understanding that the way the Saviour has come into the world is shocking yet ordinary. Avery Dulles says: “Incarnation does not provide us with a ladder by which to escape from the ambiguities of life and scale the heights of heaven; rather, it enables us to burrow deep into the heart of planet earth and find it shimmering with divinity.”
Recently, while delivering a course on loss and grief, I was faced with the pain many people carry. In moments of crisis, people desire to find meaning as they search for God’s presence. Glib answers do not do justice to the quest of their hearts. Those living through suffering and personal tragedy feel numb and helpless as they imagine God to be what the incarnation shows He is not. Tragedy can easily block Christ’s light from our hearts as we search for Him in the wrong way.
Christmas is a key answer to understand Christian faith. It speaks about the ordinary flesh that comes to visit us in an unexpected way. The God who is three times holy, the one who made heaven and earth and all that is seen and unseen, was born in a barn, outside the city walls, in a place where no one in his right senses would ever look for God.
Through the mystery of the incarnation, God can be found in simple, ordinary human life. God became human so that we can become like God and so that we may find Him in every human condition. He becomes one of us, like us, and experiences the depth of the human condition. What Christianity offers is not an intellectual answer but a relationship – Emmanuel – A God who is with us.
G.K Chesterton says “the deep secret of life is to learn to look at things familiar until they look unfamiliar again”. This is the secret of Christmas and God’s mystery. Who can be afraid of a small child? He comes in ordinary, human flesh and in ordinary ways to make us realise that God is found in human relationships and in human life as much as He can be found in churches, monasteries and religious activities.
Christianity is interlocked in life’s mystery to such an extent that it is difficult to distinguish where divinity starts and humanity ends. Through the incarnation our condition is forever assumed in the nature of God. He is so intimately intertwined with our condition that it is impossible to dismantle.
Christmas can take us in two different paths: we can either just commemorate as Christ’s birthday or it can create in us a spirit that leads us to seek in faith and hope the joy of the journey and the depth of the ordinary when this is united with God. Christmas is all about presence that empowers us and gives us eyes to look for God where no one expects Him to be – in our human flesh, in our human story. We should not waste our energy attacking consumerism but we need to win people over by linking the Gospel to all that exists inside them and to let God’s beauty penetrate their inner beauty.
Evangelisation should be the answer of this season as a Father of the Church once said: “It would be in vain that Christ was born in Bethlehem two thousand years ago if he is not born in your heart today”.
frmartincilia@gmail.com
Fr Martin Cilia is a member of the Missionary Society of St Paul.