CHRISTMAS GREETINGS

 

 

"Light from Light,

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
 

 Image on the front cover

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