+ I’m a
church geek. You know how you know I’m a church geek? Because one of my
greatest pleasures in life is doing the Christmas morning Mass. Yes, I know. Christmas Eve is beautiful. But Christmas
morning. I don’t know. It’s just just…something
special. I think that is what Christmas Day is all about. This sense of it all
being just…a bit more holy and complete.
The great
Trappist monk and poet, Thomas Merton, once wrote this poem. I love it:
Make ready
for the
Christ
whose smile,
like
lightning
sets free
the Song
of
everlasting
glory
that now
sleeps
in your
paper
flesh like
Dynamite.
For me, that captures perfectly this
strange feeling I have experiencing this morning how I LOVE a Christmas Day
mass And now—this morning— Christmas is here. This morning, we celebrate the Light. And we celebrate the Word.
We celebrate the Light that has come
to us in our collective and personal darkness. We celebrate the Light that has come to us in
our despair and our fear, in our sadness and in our frustration. And we
celebrate this Word that has been spoken to us—this Word of hope. This Word that God is among us. We celebrate
this
“Christ
whose smile,
like
lightning
sets free
the Song
of
everlasting
glory
When we
think long and hard about this day, when we ponder it and let it take hold in
our lives, what we realized happened on that day when Jesus was born was not
just some mythical story. It
was not just the birth of a child under dire circumstances, in some distant,
exotic land.
What happened on that day was a
joining together—a joining of us and God. God met us half-way. God came to us in our darkness, in our
blindness, in our fear—and cast a light that destroyed that darkness, that
blindness, that fear.
God didn’t have to do what God did. God didn’t have to descend among us
and be one of us. But by doing so, God
showed us a remarkable intimacy.
Last
night at Mass I shared a great quote from the great Dominican theologian,
Meister Ekhart:
“What
good is it if Mary gave birth to the Son
of God [two thousand years ago]? I too must give birth to the Son of God in my
time, here and now. We are all meant to be the mothers of God. God is always needing
to be born.”
I love that
quote and I think it’s very true. We
need to be the people through whom God is born again and again in this world. We
need to bring God into reality in this world again and again.
Why? Because God is a God of love. Because we are loved by God. Because we are
accepted by God. Because we are—each of us—important to God. We are, each of us, broken and imperfect as we
may be some times, very important to God. Each of us. And because we are, we
must love others.
We must
give birth to our God so others can know this amazing love as well. Knowing this amazing love of God changes everything.
When we realize that God knows us as
individuals. That God loves us and
accepts each of us for who we are, we are joyful. We are hopeful of our future
with that God. And we want to share this love and this God with others. That is
what we are celebrating this morning. Our hope and joy is in a God who comes
and accepts us and loves us for who we are and what we are—a God who
understands what it means to live this sometimes frightening uncertain life we
live. This is the real reason why we are
joyful and hopeful on this beautiful morning. This is why we are feeling within us a strange
sense of longing. This is why we are rushing toward our Savior who has come to
visit us in what we once thought was our barrenness.
Let the
hope we feel today as God our Savior draws close to us stay with us now and
always. Let the joy we feel tonight as God our Friend comes to us in love be
the motivating force in how we live our lives throughout this coming year. God is
here. God is in our midst today. God is so near, our very bodies and souls are
rejoicing. And God loves us.
The great Anglican poet Christina
Rosetti put it more eloquently:
love, all
lovely, love divine;
love was
born at Christmas:
star and
angels gave the sign.
That is what we are experiencing
this day.
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