Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Robert James Magliula, OHC
Christmas Day - Friday, December 25, 2020
embodied the active response of God, and through his life transmitted God’s creative life in and to humanity. They wanted to say clearly that the
whole life of Jesus is God’s gift to us, that God’s everlasting Word, did and does, something in Jesus. What seemed far off became near. What seemed secure and strong meets us in the form of weakness: an infant. The love involved in giving up safety and status provides a hint about the kind of love that is God’s, and that is God.
Christianity’s true and unique story line has always been Incarnation. That means that the spiritual and the material are one, that God and humanity truly coexist in the same body, in the same place. Jesus is a
human being standing in human history, Jewish history. Both Luke and Matthew relate the story of Jesus’ birth so as to make it clear that it is God’s initiative. Luke’s Gospel brings this to a dramatic climax in Mary. The Savior is the adopted Son of David, but his human flesh derives from God’s act in a person of no significance. God works through this unknown young girl. There is no mention of any moral worthiness, achievement, or preparedness in her, only humble, courageous trust and surrender. She could carry Jesus because she knew how to receive gift. In that, she offers a profound image of how generativity and fruitfulness can break into this world.
From her we learn that we can’t manage, maneuver, or manipulate spirit. It is a matter of letting go and receiving what is freely given. The art of letting go is really the art of survival. Victimhood is a dead end. Once you make it your narrative, it never stops gathering evidence about how you have been wronged by life, by others, and even by God. Real life starts by letting go. It is the gradual emptying of our attachment to our small self so that there is room for new conception and new birth. If we try to manage God or manufacture our own worthiness by any performance principle, we will never give birth to the Christ, but only to more of ourselves.
Jesus is pure grace, pure gift, so the story of his birth tells us with great vividness that the real miracle is the fact of Jesus himself. He is the mystery of God’s coming among us, God’s own life as gift and love. In the Christmas story we see God become helpless, become like us, become subject to the tensions of growth, become flesh so we might have the confidence to recognize that we have the stuff it takes to become like God.
What was personified in the body of Jesus was a manifestation of this one universal truth: matter is, and has always been, the hiding place for Spirit, forever offering itself to be discovered anew. The flesh, in other words, is all we have. It is our glory. It is our power. It is beautiful, and it is the clay out of which we shape a better tomorrow. Only a nondual mind allows us to say yes to the infinite mystery of Jesus and the infinite mystery that we are to ourselves. They are finally the same mystery.
God comes among us as an infant, vulnerable, wordless, dependent. As an infant he calls forth from us a love that is most natural and unforced, a tender sympathy, even protectiveness----that universal conspiracy of baby worship. But remember it is God we are talking about---the maker of all, the source of all power, the source of our anxiety as we seek approval and support. The human temptation is to get involved in complicated strategies to make things right with God. We devise systems of religious law and observance. We recruit God on our side as the supreme moralist. We use God to bless our crusades and agendas. We capture and display God as our ally. That temptation is heightened at Christmas with this tightly swaddled baby looking like a passive, docile, gift-wrapped object, a lucky mascot for our use. In him we can imagine God is made functional, dependent, and quiet, while we do the talking, boosting our strength, and brandishing this beautiful idol to threaten others, especially the outsiders not included in our circle of religion, morality, and ideology.
We forget that this is a real human baby. Every parent knows that babies are wordless and dependent, but they are not silent as a rule. Nor are they passive. They make their presence felt. They alter lives. Their dependence is a matter of broken sleep, hungry mouths, and dirty diapers. They need to be taught, watched, and entertained. If God is with us as an infant, then God is an insistent presence, without shame or restraint. All the crying can be disturbing since the baby cannot express his need. So, we must wait, attending patiently, until it becomes clear. We have to wait even longer before we can develop a common language. Far from being a tool for our schemes, this divine infant confronts us with the mysterious strangeness of God. God will not be captured and turned into a totem for our tribal passions. This God cannot be relied upon to guarantee our judgements or our prejudices. This is not an imprisoned God, but the God of the stable and cross. His weakness, his wordlessness is his power. He is the God who is there for all----for the enemy and the outcast and all who are not like us.
How do we respond to such a God who has come among us? What do we make of this gift of love too great to make sense of? When the mystery of God’s love breaks into our consciousness, do we run from it, or like Mary, respond from our deepest, truest self and say yes to what will change us forever. The shepherds, who stood on the margins of society, were struck with awe and rejoiced. Today, we too can offer God the gift of our rejoicing. God yearns for the hearts of those who can and will rejoice in this gift of love. The useless gifts of art and beauty, of ritual and music, are not an end in themselves, but are there to liberate our joy. When our joy is liberated, so will our generosity and compassion be. It is only when we learn to give, not from a sense of debt, but from an overflowing joy, that we can have some share in this action of redeeming and recreating love. We are so bad at loving that we need the shock of joy to set our love free, to have our selfish habits and self-obsession broken open. Our love needs to be shocked into action.
Joy cannot be cultivated. We can’t go out looking for it. As C.S. Lewis noted, we are surprised by joy. The point is not about joy but about what causes it. We must freely yield ourselves to the wonder of God’s gift. When we have made that basic surrender, like Mary, and exposed ourselves to the shock of it, then the joy and beauty, the transfiguring compassion and love will flow in generous and loving acts.
On this happy morning we give thanks for the God who has come among us, sweeping away our tribalism, our moral smugness, our religious fussiness. The inarticulate crying and the incomprehensible laughter of a real infant wakes us out of our deathlike sleep and life begins: the life of patient and loving attention to our Great Lover, the slow learning of a new language and a new world we can share with him.
Amen.
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