CHRISTMAS GREETINGS
True God from
True God”
Mysteries in the Light
See the
Sun lies down to sleep,
Having
run His course across
Wooded
hills and open fields
Brightly
shedding light and warmth
Healing
hearts that needed hope
Winning
them to sing His praise,
Day by
day from morn till night
’Tuned to
Mary’s magnificat,
Worship,
honour, glory be
Now for
ever hymning round
Him who
formed and graces all
nature in
peace and beauty sound.
Behold
this little Son entombed no more,
Outshines
the star that led to Him abed
Upon a
crib of hay to feed not beasts,
But us
who yearn to grasp His light in Bread.
© Michael
L. Gaudoin-Parker
Assisi
– 15 December 2017
St Peter-Julian Eymard preached his last Christmas
sermon one hundred and fifty years ago on Wednesday 25 December 1867 in the
chapel of the Blessed Sacrament in Paris. (Cf. PP 48)
In the very beautiful imagery of this sermon Eymard weaves
together various texts from the Holy Scriptures, relating them to what was the
theme song of his whole life as a bearer of the joy-giving Good News or Gospel of
the Eucharist.
Taking as his text “Ecce ego evangelizo vobis gaudium magnum” (“Behold, I announce to
you tidings of great joy” – Lk 2:10), he recalls that Jesus Christ is the
Second Adam, who united our human nature to His divine nature (cf. 2 Pt 1:4)
and yet more wonderfully gives Himself to us now in Communion, “the Bread our
hearts can’t forget.” This gift of Himself was already made on the hill of
Bethlehem, “domus panis” (“the house
of bread”), whose peak leaned towards that other hill, Calvary, where He, like
a grain of wheat, would be crushed and ground to make Bread.
This Food, unlike that which nourishes animals and
becomes assimilated into them, transforms us into Him. Anyone who eats His
flesh will share His abundant life eternally, as Jesus assured (cf. Jn 6:54). He
makes Himself little in this Food so that it could be taken in by little ones,
children, like whom we must become, dependent on their mother and father for
life, instead of clinging to our egotistical and arrogant self-sufficiency.
In the Cenacle - the new “House of Bread” opening the
door to paradise on earth - we learn to be docile, taught by God Himself (cf.
Jn 6:45), and thus become His friends, not mere servants, enabled to understand
all that He reveals (cf. Jn 15:15). This understanding bestowed by the Spirit
of Jesus Christ, the Second Adam, is truly life-giving, since it is far deeper
than the empty promise made by the wily serpent in Eden (cf. Gen 3:5). Through
Communion this understanding transforming our hearts and lives grows in us and
enables us to grow to bear witness to His life in us, like the martyr Ignatius
of Antioch who at the dawn of the Christian age said: “frumentum Christi sum” (“I am Christ’s wheat” – Letter to the
Romans, 4,1).
ô
Could any image be more appropriate than that of the
revered site in the church of Jesus Christ’s Nativity in the little town of Bethlehem,
where pilgrims devoutly kneel to pray for that peace which only He, the Prince
of Peace, “the Star of David” can give? This image recalls us to the utter
beauty and sheer simplicity of the Divine Child’s Birth. In our situation
today, disturbed by the fall from grace of our idols – the popular “stars” of
glitz and glamour – or dominated by leaders insanely vying for power with
threatening destructive weapons, the
site, fittingly indicated in the form of an asterisk (*), symbolises this is
the Capital of “the still point of the turning world” (in T.S. Eliot’s phrase),
that point highlighting that encounter and realisation of “the tranquillity of
order” in the harmonious coincidence of time and place, the communion of all people
and creation at-one with God in one heart and soul.
This is brought about by that other sign, the glorious
Sign of Christ Jesus, who is depicted not lying on a bed of hay nor as da Vinci’s
famous configuration of self-empowered Vitruvian Man, but who comes to us by
being first conceived in the Virgin Mary’s
heart before her womb (cf. St Augustine, Disc., 215, 4), the true figure
of rebirth, the resplendent New Apollo, reaching out to and uplifting all
people as he is outstretched on a star-shaped Sign, the Tree of Life, the
glorious Cross of the true and eternal Sol
Invictus.
W