What does the Incarnation bring us?
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| St Joseph with the Child Jesus |
Love, God’s love: At the center of Christmas is the mystery
of God’s Love. Are we aware of the
immensity of this gift? Are we aware of
the implications this Love brings to and for our lives, and for our world? This Love brings intimacy in our relation
with God and with one another. It is a
love that transforms the power of darkness into life and has the power to
continue to do so. This Love that is at
the center of Christmas will not only gift us in profound ways, but it will
also ask something of us. It is a Love
that stretches us in the shape of a cross because it asks that we first (daily)
carry our own cross into life and healing.
It is a Love that calls us and enables us to shoulder the burdens of one
another….And it asks of us, which I know often feels impossible, that we love
our enemy….that we stretch to love the one who is different….even more to love
the one who has hurt us…How we concretely do this or how we move in this
direction is not for now. What is for
now is that we are given the gift, the loving power to do this in small and
larger ways. This Love given ‘to and for
us’ is truly a miracle for what it can work in human lives!
Now, hodie, we are
given the possibility because of Christ…because of God’s gift to us in Christ…we
are given the power of an unrequited Love….it is holding us right now…it is
sustaining us right now….and it is to become even more flesh of our flesh. Fr. Alfred Delp writes: “What this
celebration is about is the founding of a final order for the world, a new
center of meaning for all existence. We
are not celebrating some children’s holiday, but rather the fact that God has
spoken His ultimate Word to the world.
Christ is the ultimate Word of God to the world. One must let this idea really sink in these
days when people are seeking new values” (Give
Us This Day, p.277). This Divine
birth is about a ‘new center of meaning’ out of which we are to live our
lives. It births forth the ‘new values’
that help us live more like Christ in our views and perspectives, and in our
relations with one another. It enables
us to embrace paradox so that the ‘new values’ or new wine of the gospel take
root and become embodied in our lives and in this community.
The Incarnation happened two thousand years ago…and it is
still happening today. Fr. Delp
emphasizes that we need to let the reality of the Incarnation sink in, sink
into our heart, sink into our consciousness.
I think he is right on…we, most of the time, are not even aware that it
is at the center of our lives especially when we get pulled into ‘I-It’ stuff
forgetting why we are even in a monastery or why God has placed each of us on
this precious earth. Letting the reality
of the Incarnation sink into our lives: this gift of God’s very life given
freely to us: this gift, ever-new, ever hopeful, ever bringing wisdom, ever
bringing the new of God that can heal all division and conflicts within our
selves, with one another and in the larger world dynamics that affect all of us
daily. The Incarnation of Christ is
radical in the breadth and depth of its power to transform and to save…in its
capacity for freedom and joy, for bringing meaning and hope, for showing a way
forward when one can not find their way.
A light is shining in our darkness and the darkness cannot quench it…and
this light is to be even more manifest because like Mary we are ready to
receive it, receive it with our ‘yes’, receive it by giving our flesh and blood
to incarnate God’s gift and not quench it, bury it, or put it under a bushel
basket!
We just received Jim Loney’s Christmas card. He writes so simply, so profoundly the
following:
Good news joy
born
in
deep
night waiting
here,
this
manger
will do.
Dear sisters: the manger of our lives will do….because we
are each here….here like Mary with our ‘yes’….there is nothing more we need to
do…just to be here, here with a living faith and the right intention. Yes, with these we will receive the gift that
awaits each one of us this Christmas.
Amen.
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