I love the simplicity of Christmas. For all the excitement and fuss of the holiday, at the centre of our Christian Christmas is the baby in the manger. This most familiar scene remains the focal point of the great feast in the midst of all the parties, decorations, tinsel and evergreens. It’s about the child with his mother.
In a way one can say that this is also true of our entire religion. Christ in his sacred humanity stands at the centre of our faith. He took our nature, becoming one of us in the womb of His Blessed Mother and so today in life of the Church the same man stands as our way, our truth and our life. The Christmas story is not a fairy tale at the beginning of the Gospels but it introduces us to the deep mysteries of our faith and invites us to be part of the story.
Bethlehem
To the stable in Bethlehem were invited the poor and uneducated shepherds together with the rich and highly educated Three Wise Men. One group came because of the inspiration of heavenly grace in the message of the angels while the Magi came as a result of their own intellectual searching.
These two groups stand as bookends of the procession of humanity which are invited to the meet the Lord. No one is excluded from this scene. All are welcome, rich and poor, educated or uneducated, through the promptings of interior grace or the searching of the human intellect. We can all find our ways to the manger, to meeting Christ, in different ways and at different time.
In many ways the shepherds and the Magi are very different but they also share much in common. They all go to see what is happening. They allow themselves to be taken on a journey. They come to the stable curious and willing to discover what God is doing in their lives.
Changed
Also they go away changed. We are told in the Gospels that the shepherds returned glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen while we are told the Magi went home a different way. This just doesn’t mean by a different route but they go away new men, following a new path in their lives.
At the heart of our celebrating Christmas in the midst of all the fuss, keep it simple and focused. It is about meeting Jesus and allowing him to touch our lives, as he did the lives of the shepherds and the Magi. We must never lose sight of the friendly and familiar surroundings of our faith.
God can come to us in the most unassuming of ways, touches us quietly and as gently as the claps of a baby’s hand. He never forces Himself on us but invites us to live in his love. When everything is said and done, we are definitely loved. The message of the scene from Bethlehem teaches us we are infinitely loved!
Every grace and blessing for this Christmas and the New Year
You never know when you might meet a saint
Recently the Vatican announced that during the Holy Year 2025 the Pope will canonize two young Italian Catholics, one was a member of the Dominican Laity, Pier Giorgo Frassati, the other a teenager Carlo Acutis who died at the age of 15.
At the end of November, I was in our Dominican church in Tralee when a relic of the heart of Blessed Carlo was present. Over the weekend thousands came to pray and to be blessed with the relic. It was amazing to see the draw of this young teenager.
Later in the week I was speaking to a fellow Dominican priest who told me he had met Carlo Acutis in Fatima. I was amazed and wanted to know how he had met him and how did he know who he was.
My fellow Dominican said that he was sitting on a wall by the shrine in Fatima and this young Italian kid came and sat with him He had excellent English and they had a conversation about the Blessed Sacrament.
After the conversation they went their ways. The priest didn’t think about the meeting again until a few years later he saw a picture of a young teenager in a Catholic paper and realised that the young fellow he had sat with and talked with about the faith was about to be beatified. The young man had been Carlo Acutis. So you never know when you might sit and talk with a saint.