Christmas! The Savior is born!
Joy to the world, the Lord is come!
What changed? Yesterday evening surfing through the TV channels I could see that Christmas is really the feast of Love, selfless love that is. Short of a catastrophe such as Katrina or a Tsunami, it seems to be the only time that our media culture acknowledges as politically correct to be nice to one’s fellow person, and the poorer that person, the better. That in itself would be the great accomplishment of Christmas. So, yes, for that today, something has changed. Already something is accomplished: we understand, and celebrate -if only once a year-, the knowledge that things could be different in the world if we were just a little nicer.
It’s great. OK. And tomorrow we will be back to our old tricks! Has anything changed?
I understand better the mystery of the ‘already and not yet’ by comparing our world of the ‘here and now’, the world of limitations of time and space, to a drop of water in the ocean. The drop of water is part of the ocean, sustained by it, moved by it. It goes up and down, this way and that way, sometime hot, sometime cold, more or less salty, more or less transparent. It can even evaporate, but eventually it will go back to the ocean. The little drop cannot comprehend the immensity of the ocean, or even imagine what in fact it does belong to, willing or not.
I find this image very helpful. The drop is not separate from the ocean, and yet it has a life of its own. That explains the ‘already’! We are already part of the Divine’s immensity, of the Divine’s existence, if not we would not exist. That is pretty simple.
The ‘Not Yet’ is that we cannot for the moment comprehend, in the true sense of the world, the reality we belong to.
But, there is Christmas! There is a portal, an access, which allows us to communicate with the larger reality, the divine reality. That portal I believe is Jesus. The Good News announced by John the Baptist, the Kingdom of Heaven proclaimed by Christ is the power which was given to us to access the Divine reality. Yes, we can!
Each time we love, we access the divine. Whomever, wherever, whatever the religion. God bursting into our world in the person of Jesus, made possible our access to the Ocean, whenever we so choose. Each one of our acts of love is indeed a sacrament of God’s presence.
Christmas is indeed the feast of Love, but also and perhaps more the feast of Hope.
Merry Christmas!
