WELCOME GOD IN A CHILD
Christmas is much more than that superficial and manipulated atmosphere that we breathe those days in our streets. A feast day much deeper and more joyful than the fabrications of our consumer society. We believers have to recover once again the heart of this feast and discover underneath so much superficiality and busyness the mystery that is the source of our joy.
We won’t understand Christmas if we don’t know how to have silence in our heart, to open our soul to the mystery of a God who comes close to us, to welcome the life God offers us, and to taste the celebration of the coming of a God-Friend.
In the midst of our daily life, sometime so tedious, burnt-out and sad, we are invited to joy. «You can’t be sad when life is being born» (St. Peo the Great). This isn’t about a tasteless and superficial joy, the joy of those who are joyful without knowing why. «We have come for the radiant joy, the full joy, the solemn feast: God has become human and has come to dwell among us» (Leonardo Boff).
There is a joy that can only be had by those who are open to God’s nearness and who allow themselves to be drawn by God’s tenderness. A joy that frees us from fears and lack of trust before God. How can you fear a God who comes close to us as a child? How can you flee from One who offers Self as a fragile and defenseless little one? God hasn’t come to us armed with power in order to impose on people. God has come close to us in the tenderness of a child whom we can make smile or cry.
God isn’t the omnipotent and powerful Being that we humans sometimes imagine, closed up in seriousness and the mystery of an inaccessible world. God is this child caringly handed over to humanity, this little one who seeks our gaze so that we will rejoice in his smile. The fact that God has become a child says much more of who God is than all our musings and speculations about God’s mystery.
If we would know how to stop in silence before this child and welcome from the bottom of our being the whole nearness and tenderness of God, maybe we would understand why the heart of us believers must be pierced by a different joy: simply because God is with us.
José Antonio Pagola
Translator: Fr. Jay VonHandorf
