The Christmas Mystery raises prayer to the warmth and light of
motherhood and family. These primordial elements of our common humanity God Himself has made sacred by associating them with Himself. He did so in a singular
way when the Word became flesh, when the source of all Meaning entered into the hardships, doubts, fears, and insecurities of our alienated humanity, a painful existence which so needs to be loved.
When Divinity infused our poverty with its treasures, the very relationship
of mother to child was endowed in a particular way with new and eternal
meaning, a truth that surpasses all understanding. Here, the
unfathomable reality of what it means to be family is disclosed to the eyes of
faith and after all these centuries, we have not even begun to penetrate these
riches.
In our efforts to love one another, to renounce what we
think we want so that there is room in our lives for family and new life, to be
patient with the sorrows we inevitably cause each other, to persevere with one
another’s weakness, to defer to one another, to resist contention and false
judgment, to speak the truth with love even at the risk of being
misunderstood, to share a reason for our hope, to be merciful even to the point
of appearing to be taken advantage of; in all of this, when lived out with the
same tender reverence that Mary and Joseph showed one another in their own struggles
to make a home for the Christ-child; in this very effort, though fraught with
all kinds of weakness and inadequacy, failures and shortcomings, trials and
hardships, a joyful echo of the Father’s saving whisper into the heart of
humanity resounds; a whisper to which faith listens and hears anew, amid
angel’s choirs, those divine but distressed cries in the darkness of a cold night wrapped in our
swaddling clothes.
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