Posted on 12/21/2005 12:18:02 PM PST by NYer
If one were to ask most people what they hope to accomplish in their lifetime, the answers we are likely to get are the following: To become rich; to fulfill myself; to become famous; to make the headlines; to have power; to be beautiful, intelligent, and admired. To be on television; to be a champion; to be the best in whatever field I am engaged in. This is called the American dream. These are secular standards: In our society, we rate people according to them. We feel awed when meeting billionaires; we feel privileged when we can shake the hands of a big shot; we are elated when they happen to pay attention to us, or know our names. Self-made men are our heroes: They come to the U.S.A. penniless, and by dint of hard work, perseverance, courage become “great men.” These wishes are typically “human.” They are all “redolent” of original sin: A perverted self-love blurs our vision and tempts us to upset the objective hierarchy of values. Like Esau we sell our birthright for a mess of pottage. We become blind to what truly matters. What attracts us has, in fact, the smell of death. Fame, power, and money cannot accompany us in our casket. Many poetic fairy tales are woven on the theme of ascending from poverty to riches, from lonesomeness and neglect, to greatness and honor (Cinderella). We are delighted when a peasant girl meets and marries a prince . . . and they were happy forever after. We are about to celebrate Christmas and its message can be understood and appreciated only on our knees for it runs counter to all the appeals and promises of secularism. Christ was born in utter poverty, in a stable and placed in a manger. Only His Holy Mother and her chaste spouse are present, together with a couple of animals who could not know how blessed they were. This birth is not advertised; no one knows about the greatest event in history, a religious earthquake, an event that was going to revolutionize the world. Humble shepherds are informed by angels that a Savior was born; three great men from the East come to adore a baby boy. The rest is passed in silence and mystery. This newborn child — the Emmanuel — the God-man — will lead a life of poverty, humiliation, and suffering that ends on Calvary. To quote Isaiah: “. . . He has no form or comeliness that we should look at him, no beauty that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief . . . he was despised, and we esteemed him not”(50:2-3). To crave for honor, recognition, success, and earthly happiness is, after all, “reasonable” and “normal.” Christmas reminds us that Christianity is a religious, metaphysical, and moral tsunami: It shatters secular ideals, declares their inanity and false promises. It is a scandal for the Jews; foolishness for the Gentiles. It shocks earthly prudence and mediocre reasonableness. It is “madness,” but this madness is a divine one. It upsets all purely human measures and can only be understood and received in humble gratitude, on one’s knees. Plato had some vague inkling of this when, in Phaedrus, he distinguished between a madness indicative of mental derangement, and “divine madness” when a clear perception of what is infinitely precious and valuable, makes a man joyfully abandon everything for the sake of gaining the precious pearl: union with the one true God. The Savior presented to us on Christmas day is a helpless Child, born in utter poverty. This Child is the King of the universe who tramples upon our pride, selfishness, and metaphysical arrogance. We should pray for the ineffable grace of recognizing Him, in His humility and poverty, and come to the crib with a heart conscious both of its need of redemption, and of its immense debt of gratitude to this Child lying helpless in a manger, whose stripes will heal us. No purely “rational” argument can ever convince a “reasonable” mind that He is the King of the Universe. But to those who have ears to hear, the divine message is overwhelming and should open the door to faith for it tells us that Christianity could never have been invented by a human mind. Was it not Kierkegaard who wrote that it is the invention of a mad God — i.e., that must be the conclusion drawn by a human mind proud of its sanity. The immensity of divine love alone can explain the “madness” of the Incarnation. Furthermore, how is one to explain rationally that 12 ignorant men — whose weaknesses and sins are related in detail in the Gospel — managed to conquer the Roman Empire? The holy tears of the divine Child lying in a manger, mixed with the drops of blood He will shed in Gethsemane (“His sweat became like drops of blood. . . .”) and on Golgotha — being divine — operated a miracle in the minds and hearts of proud, selfish, hard-hearted, revengeful, unforgiving human beings. These tears transformed their hearts of stone into hearts of flesh. The miracle which started in Nazareth, was fulfilled in Bethlehem, and reached its apogee in Golgotha is a continuing miracle proving the divinity of Christ; He is present in His Holy Bride the Church, and in the Holy Eucharist. The divinity of the Godchild is proven again and again because those of us who are privileged to recognize His Kingship and follow Him to Golgotha, do become saints, a perfection that has the imprint of the divine. Holiness would be not only inconceivable but intrinsically impossible if the Child born in Bethlehem was not God. St. Francis’ life is a living proof that Christ is God. The only adequate response to the birth of the divine Child is: Venite, adoremus.
Hosanna in the highest!
Amen!
In the Beginning
In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God.
In the beginning,
outside of time as we know it
before the clock of the universe started ticking
there you were,
The lover, the beloved, the love,
O my God.
And loving,
you began the clock
that led to this moment.
You brought us your light
to shine in our darkness,
to reveal the meaninglessness
we thought our lives to be,
who showed us the darkness
to be but shadows,
revealed to us the depths of your love,
your longing to bring us to you,
the price you were willing to pay.
You who created,
who breathed life into the lifeless world,
who, beyond all need to step into time,
came for love,
came to show us love,
came to be love for us.
Glory to you!
Thank you for this post. I love Alice von Hildebrand. The only thing better would have been to hear her read it.
Thanks for posting this!!
It's hard for secular educators to teach anything but secular evolution without admitting to divine intervention.
Beautiful!!
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