He who was one in substance with the Father
stooped down to share the substance of his mother and thereby took on himself
our fallen nature, our human condition. Thus, the mystery of new birth shone
upon us, so that through the same Spirit by whom Christ was conceived and
brought forth, we too might be born again by a spiritual birth.
Nothing about his birth
took place outside our human condition. What we really celebrate today is that
Jesus continues to be born in the narrowness of our lives,
taking on our very earthy humanness in order to give his love to the world
through us, through our flesh and blood. The British mystic, poet, and
spiritual teacher Caryll Houselander puts it this way:
The
reason why we are where we are this Christmas...is because it is here in
this place that Christ wants to be born; it is from here that he wants his life
to begin again in the world. The reason that we are with these particular
people is because it is precisely to these people that Christ wants us to give
his love. This year we are his trustees for these people; he has put his love
for them into our hands, into our hearts. We did not choose this place—Christ
has chosen it. We did not choose these people—Christ has chosen them.
We are
asked one thing: to have the humility and courage to open the secret place of
our heart to Christ, conscious though we are that it is as derelict as the
stable, and that his light will reveal the mouse and the spider.
It may
have been puzzling, even to Mary, how Christ was giving his life to the whole
world in the obscurity of Bethlehem, but it was enough for her that this was
his way. It still is, and he himself is the Way, the only way to our peace.
We have truly received
love upon love, grace upon grace; but we truly receive only by sharing: by
sharing so great a gift from our own narrowness and darkness. Infant born in
Bethlehem was not afraid of our narrowness and darkness, but precisely from
there draws us and the whole world into his superabundant Light and Life.
Taken from Father Dominic's homily for Christmas Day.
