Christmas and our rebirth

CHRISTMAS is, of course, about the birth of our Lord, Jesus

Christ. It is such a beautiful event that, thanks to God, we still

like to romanticize to the hilt. But no matter how much romance and

fantasy we put in there, we know that we actually can never fully

fathom the tremendous wonder that this event brings about, since the

whole thing is a mystery.

          Christmas is about God’s great and overwhelming love for us.

It is about God who by becoming man adapts himself to us to recover

our lost dignity as his image and likeness, adopted children of his,

meant to share in his very life and nature. It is about God lowering

himself to raise us up to where he wants us to be. It is a completely

gratuitous love that we should also learn to develop in ourselves.

          Pope Francis recently has written about how wonderful it

would be if we continue to put the nativity scene in our homes and in

many other places. In it, he explained the symbolism attached to the

different characters and elements we like to put in the crèche. He is

encouraging us to do our prayer and meditation in front of the crèche.

          It might be good to go through that document and transmit

its message vigorously to a world that is showing signs of losing its

religious moorings. We cannot deny that with our world becoming more

and more technology-immersed, somehow the attractiveness of the

mystery of Christmas is undermined. We have to counter this trend.

          Yes, with the rapid technological development today, people,

especially the young, tend to be overly immersed in the earthly,

material and temporal things in our life, at the expense of the

spiritual and supernatural dimensions of our life. They tend to be

more self-oriented rather than others-oriented which is what is ideal

for us, since we are meant for loving.

          To counter this tendency, we have to be with Christ. And

Christmas is a very good occasion to achieve that ideal. Christmas

should mean to us as Christ wanting to be born in us, so that we that

we can be born again into the life of grace, into the very life of

Christ, which we lost through our sin, both the original and the

personal.

  

          Christmas is a time of rebirth, of another conversion so

that our identification with Christ, the pattern of our humanity and

savior of our damaged humanity, becomes ever tighter. We have to

realize ever more deeply that we need to be reborn. We have to do

whatever is needed to make this need felt sharply by us. We cannot

deny that today’s conditions seem to desensitize us of this most basic

need of ours.

          Precisely for his purpose, Christ made himself so easily

available to us that he makes himself not only present to us up to

now, but to give himself to us completely especially in the sacrament

of the Holy Eucharist.

          To be reborn in Christ, who is our “way, truth and life,” to

be “alter Christus” if not “ipse Christus” (another Christ, Christ

himself) as we ought to be, is not a pipe dream. Christ is all there

for the taking.

          And as St. Paul also asserted, “Christ himself gave the

apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to

equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may

be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge

of the Son of God and become mature, attaining the whole measure of

the fullness of Christ.” (Eph 4,11-13)

          Let us learn to feel at home with this tremendous truth

about ourselves and start to do something to conform our life to this

truth of our faith!

        Merry Christmas to one and all!