God Born in the Flesh is our Celebration

So, what is up with you and me along with the world? We need to ask the question to focus ourselves in a real way as there is no doubt so much is “up with us.” The beauty and grace of Christmas needs to provoke us profoundly and deeply. It is interesting for me to listen to so many people being worn out with the demands of the season, and there can be so much. However, the Christmas season goes for a short time after December 25th, and we need to focus on the fact that God became a human being. When I was young, the Flesh celebration went until February 2nd, and the advantage was being able to sing Christmas songs and have the gift of pondering the Mystery of Love for a period. It is not to be negative, but the danger now is the influence of the society that shuts down Christmas on the 26th. We need not let that happen, and it is understandable with the cultural aspects of Christmas beginning right after Halloween. Oh my!! We are not going to change it, but we can change ourselves and stay with the beauty of this way that God chooses to rescue us. So beautiful!!

Luca della Robbia's sublime 'The Visitation', dating from about 1445, from the church of San Giovanni Fuorcivitas in Pistoia. Photo taken by Fr Lawrence Lew, O.P.

In the Art series during Advent, Dr. Ulrike showed us a sculpture of the Visitation by Luca Della Robbia, 1445. Why go there at this moment? What is clear is the quote I offered during Advent from Caesar Pavese proclaiming the provocation about beginning. Pavese states: “The only joy in the world is to begin. It is good to be alive because living is beginning always, every moment. When this sensation is lacking --- as when one is numb and when living has become a habit, one might as well be dead.” Just imagine the level of longing in his heart in order to create this message of living with the heart open to beginning. Imagine Elizabeth meeting her cousin and dropping to her knees as she meets this teenager who is pregnant with her Lord. John the Baptist leaps with joy in her womb. “The only joy in the world is to begin.” These two women were living the most profound beginning in the history of the world, and the call is for us to be open to a beginning. If this “sensation is lacking,” life becomes a habit.  Mary had already received a new beginning with the Annunciation as she was visited by the Angel Gabriel proclaiming that she was full of grace in becoming the Mother of God/Jesus. Her heart recognized the need to be accompanied which moves her to journey with Elizabeth. In our beginnings, we have the same need to search for and walk with those who show us the path in following the Word becoming Flesh. Are we open to the surprise of a presence in Christ on whom we gaze for ongoing change and new life.

Please find this reflection by Luigi Giussani on Mozart: “The Divine Incarnate.” I would encourage you to listen to this masterpiece and find a translation of “Et Incarnatus Est.”

“This spectacular work by Mozart, which culminates in the song Et incarnatus est (And was made flesh) is the most powerful and convincing, the simplest and greatest expression of a man who recognizes Christ.

Et incarnatus est is singing at its purest, when all man’s straining melts in the original clarity, the absolute purity of the gaze that sees and recognizes. Et incarnatus est is a contemplation and entreaty at the same time, a stream of peace and joy welling up from the heart’s wonder at being placed before the arrival of what it has been waiting for, the miracle of the fulfillment of its quest.

There came a Man, a young Man, who entered the world in a certain town, a certain place in the world that can be identified on a map, Nazareth. When one goes to the Holy Land, to that little town, and enters the shadowy hut where there is an inscription on the wall that reads Verbum hic caro factum est (the Mystery of God, here, was made flesh), he is overcome by shivers. This is the Man Jesus of Nazareth, chosen to be the humanity of the Word, the humanity of God, God who is the answer to the heart of man whom He created, the complete, superabundant answer to the cry of the heart He created; the cry that reverberates in the mystery of the Trinity through the presence brought about by the spirit of a Jewish Man, born of a 17-year-old woman.

God communicated Himself to man in His mortal flesh, in His inhabited time and space, in His life as inhabited time and space, as a lived relationship. The Mystery shows Himself in experience, in something we suffer, desire, mistake, do right, in something we experience: in human experience, just as it is, all of it.

Would that we too, like Mozart, could contemplate with the same simplicity and intensity the beginning in the world of history of mercy and pardon, and drink from the wellspring that is Mary’s “Yes”!

This beautiful song helps us to collect ourselves in grateful silence, so that, in the heart, the flower of our ‘Yes’ can germinate and come up, the ‘Yes’ by which man can act, can become a collaborator with the Creator, can become even more than a collaborator with the Creator, a lover of the Creator. Just as it was for Mary, this girl from Nazareth, in front of the Child who had come out of her: a boundless relationship filled her heart and time.

If the religious intensity of Mozart’s music – a genius which is a gift of the Spirit – penetrated our heart, then our life, with all its restlessness, contradictions, toil, would be beautiful like his music.”

Together as a staff and all who serve our community, we wish you a very Blessed Christmas with new beginnings at every moment as we gaze on Christ.