Dear Parish Family,
 
As the excitement of Christmas speeds up, we enter a difficult week particularly for adults. If you ask people what the significance of the Christ child is for them, you’ll get responses that are all lovely and nice… but completely miss the point. If you reflect on our ‘busyness’ these days, maybe we are also missing the point. Given the routine lives so many face in living, our culture has developed an entertainment industry that tells us things are not significant unless they are spectacular. Spectacles abound in sports, entertainment, and in television. But, we must ask, what do these spectacles show us?

Escapism is another way to flee from being what we consider to be just an ordinary human being. Consider the amount of alcohol, drugs, and pornography that fills our culture. We are continually told that it is a dreaded thing to be simply and plainly human. Yet the message of Christmas is, in its radical form, a message that tells us God wants to be loved by us in our littleness and in our vulnerability. The Incarnation makes significant those things which appear to be insignificant. A simple Jewish maiden, a little town called Bethlehem, and a bunch of poor shepherds. A little known carpenter has troubled sleep thinking about his future marriage to a woman who is already with child. He wakes up with a vision of knowing God has special plans for him to bring up an exceptional family. Everyone in this narrative are ordinary looking humanity – all become apt conductors of the divine. This all happens in the inversion of popular values that Christmas brings to us. New Light comes into our world, a Light that prompts the skeptical Pontius Pilates of our own day to ask: “Truth? What is truth?” Truth is not something we establish, or agree upon by a majority vote, rather it comes from outside of us; it’s something we attain, something we come to recognize. The world thinks otherwise.
The most significant thing about Christmas is that our humanity has been invested by God with His divinity. Our ordinariness appeals to God. God wants to be loved by plain men and women, men and women who are fully alive. He wants to be loved and sought in the commonality of our human nature and experience. That was His purpose and plan. But because we are so far removed from His purposes it is only the extraordinary person who brings God into the regularity of his or her daily routines and patterns of behavior.

That is why the Virgin Mary is such an extraordinary person. She appeared to be, and was in reality, simply a little Jewish girl. She was lowly and considered herself to be a maidservant. But she was innocent and capable of wonder. In her simple humanity she was, in reality, of special appeal to God. “Full of Grace” given the opportunity to make a choice, she uses her freedom to embrace God’s will to give flesh to the divine child. Joseph in his own turn would do the same, making the choice directed by God to care for a special woman and become a father just by naming the child. Opening ourselves to discernment is what Christmas invites us to. Our ordinariness is not a stumbling block, rather it is a boon. We should pass this special message to every child we meet during these days. Thus Christmas can give us faith in our selves… it can give us hope… and it can give us love. Christmas gives us the power to see our world as God sees it, to see what in God’s light we can be. Bethlehem, Mary, Joseph and Jesus… they all belong to us because we can identify ourselves in them. May all of that allow us to be at peace with ourselves… and between ourselves… and with God. Find some quiet moment this busy week to dwell on the ‘wonder’ of the first Christmas, and make it a reality this Christmas with our near and dear ones and our Parish Family.

Fr. Tom Kunnel C.O.