How Advent turns into Christmas

The Nativity, Murillo

I tend to live Advent as an intense experience of feeling like time is running out. Most concretely this happens when I realize I want to get thoughtful presents for my nieces and nephews. I have a few weeks. But the time runs out, so I end up depending on Amazon expedited shipping to get me out of a jam. How superficial you say! Maybe, but giving a gift is noble in itself, and rightly a Christmas thing; yet we postpone the opportunities. On another level, (speaking analogously and in a theological sense), I know I am supposed to prepare in some way to be able to celebrate the mysteries of Christmas.

Christmas is like the liturgical road-block that reminds us we have to recover the heart of a child in order to know Jesus and enter into his Kingdom. And every year I find myself facing the approach of the 25th wishing that Christian insight and simplicity of heart could come by expedited shipping. I should have meditated the Gospel more, spent more time with the Blessed Sacrament, been more conscious of ways to help the poor. Time runs out, though, and the liturgical roadblock starts looking like a vehicle heading in my direction. Jesus is coming again. I am not just heading to meet him. He is moving towards me. I sense him coming from afar. Time is a gift. Don't let it slip away.

The 25^th arrives like someone knocking at the door. We knew that a visitor was coming, but the knock always comes as a kind of surprise. It takes on the aspect of a day of judgment. Ouch! Time ran out.

The change starts simply, the whisper of grace rising through nature. Christmas ascends from beyond us and is offered to each of us.  Do you see what I see? Said the night wind to the little lamb. Do you see what I see? The simple innocence of his coming finds welcome in the poor and lowly: Said the little lamb to the shepherd boy, do you hear what I hear? From the lowly the sound is amplified to reach the mighty king: Said the shepherd boy to the mighty king, do you know what I know? This grace insinuates itself smoothly first as something seen, then as a sound heard, until reaching to become something known. Or, better yet, something savored.

He does not come in the way we had thought. When he comes, it is something simple. When all is said and done, not everything depended on my pressured preparations. There is joy, the kind you cannot plan on. The hand of glory comes by way of the fingered blessing of a child.

In the gentleness of the descent of the Word Incarnate, he takes on the aspect of a challenge. A Child, a Child shivers in the cold. In this posture, the child becomes a sword, just like when he becomes a sword on that Friday of the Cross. The only sword that the Christ sought to brandish was the one that could penetrate to our deepest heart, making us able to feel something of compassion again. The showing invites a response. By becoming a small child like any of us, he makes us able to receive his piercing appeal, and respond to him.

Do we see? Can we begin to understand? The child who is God shivers. He makes himself the vulnerable one, capable of being welcomed or rejected, embraced or struck, remembered or forgotten. Can we go to him? A shepherd brings the message to us. Can we heed him? In your palace warm, mighty king? There is still hope that our stony hearts can be converted into hearts of flesh. It all begins with the presence of the God made flesh and blood. In the manger, on the Cross, he looks for an opening into the interior of each one of us.

We talk a lot about the hope that is born on Christmas. I think that there is a risk that we will accept hopes of coal because we fail to recognize the real treasure that this child brings us. It all has to do with the appeal he makes to us. The human heart will never be as close to its hopes than when it sees this child asking for recognition and compassion, in the name of every human being that has entered into the world. God became more human than any of us.  By becoming man, God embraced all that we are; he did not reject us.

The first grace, carried by the night wind, is his coming in our flesh. The grace that follows is the response that we give him in every human being that we encounter today. This is the only way that we have to embrace this child. What a marvel! We have hopes of becoming more like God with a simple response made to the child who is God. Kissing his feet, we say to him: Make me, O Lord, as human as you. There we encounter our hope.

+df