By Sister Elise Saggau
Every year, during the Advent and Christmas seasons, the Church calls us to contemplate the mystery of the Incarnation. Year after year, the Church tirelessly brings us the original story again: “The time is at hand; reform your lives. God is on the way!” This is a time drenched in grace like dew that covers the earth on a cool summer morning, like rain that falls on parched ground. We long for this life-giving grace and yearn to believe in it, for it offers us hope.
The story of the Incarnation is really our story—the exact meeting point of God and human beings. We often think of God as some kind of remote power that has set this whole creation thing going and then stepped back to see what would happen. But, it is impossible for God to step back from anything that God has chosen to be involved with. At the very first moment of creation, God freely decided to get involved with you and me and with all created being. Absolutely everything God does, God does with free, unconditional, absolute, and irrevocable love. We find this hard to understand and accept. Yet every Christmas, we celebrate that God came among us as one of us so we could love like God and be like God and share God’s own life forever.
In the amazing reality of the Incarnation, God became exactly the same kind of human that we are. There isn’t any other kind of human. God, in human flesh, was “at home” in our created, limited, and unfinished universe. It sounds ridiculous to us. Yet we continue to contemplate this mystery, and it continues to teach us who we are and who God is. We look at a poor little baby and we see God. Is this possible? Yes, it is. We look at a poor woman with a newborn child and we see the Mother of God. Is this possible? Yes, it is. We look at our own poor flesh, heading downwards towards death; we look at our own narrow, shadowy, and generally unsatisfactory lives and see God at work. Is this possible? Yes, it is. We look at this messed up world situation, and we somehow believe that goodness will prevail. Is this possible? Yes, it is. We look at a man executed on a cross though he is totally innocent and we say: God does this for us. Is this possible? Yes, yes, it is. We say yes because we believe in the Incarnation. We believe that all creation is so beloved of God that God is right here in it with us. We believe that the story we are in has a good ending. We believe our story matters, that we matter, that matter matters, that the whole universe is on its way to some splendid and unimaginable fulfillment.
In awe and wonder, then, we contemplate the mystery of God, the mystery of ourselves, the mystery of creation. Let us accept our lives as gifts, as Christmas gifts, and not squander them in meaningless efforts to promote ourselves. Let us weep with compassion at the poverty and destitution into which our God has entered in order to be with us. Let us laugh and shout at the wonder of it all—that God should genuinely want to be with US as one of US! Let us make a feast of joy because God has come, and nothing will ever be the same again.
