A Blessed Christmas

A BLESSED CHRISTMAS
In pursuit of the truth – www.cinopsbegone.com – Thursday, December 24, 2010

This is a Blessed Christmas to everyone from the writings* of Pope Benedict XVI:

‘Rejoice! And I say again, rejoice!” The notion of joy is altogether fundamental to Christianity, which by its very nature is and claims to be evangelium, gospel, joyful news… “Rejoice in the Lord”, because the Apostle obviously believes that all true joy is joy in the Lord and that there can be no true joy at all without the Lord… Thus we are told that only through Christ did real joy appear and that in our life, in the last analysis, nothing matters more than coming to recognize and to understand Christ, the God of grace, the light and joy of the world.
‘The most genuine and most important values are found in the world precisely under the sign of humility, of hiddennous, of silence. Whatever is decisively great in this world, whatever determines its fate and its history, is that which appears small to our eyes. God, after having chosen the small and ignored people of Israel for his very own people, has made, in Bethlehem, the sign of insignificance into the decisive sign of his presence in this world. This is the challenge of the holy night – faith; faith to receive him under this sign and to trust him without arguing or grumbling. To receive him: this means for us to submit to this sign, to truth and to love, which are the highest and most God-like values, and at the same time the most neglected and most silent.

‘Christmas beckons us to enter into God’s silence, and his mystery remains unknown to so many because they cannot find the silence in which God is active. How can we find it?.. Silence means to develop sensitivity, a sensitivity for our conscience, for the eternal in us, and an openness for God speaking to us The dinosaurs are said to have become extinct because their development went in the wrong direction: plenty of armor plate and little brain, plenty of muscles and little sense. Are we not also to develop in the wrong direction: plenty of technology but little soul? A thick armor plate of material expertise but an emptied heart? Dearth of the ability to perceive God’s voice in us, to recognize and acknowledge what is beautiful and true?... it has to consist in restoring the moral and religious sense to its rightful place in man…

‘The Word became flesh… God has become flesh… God became a child who needed a mother…God became a child and every child is dependent. To be a child thus contains already the theme of the search for shelter, the elementary motif of Christmas. And how many variations has this motif seen in our history… There is indeed an atmosphere of hostility toward children, but is this not preceded by an attitude that altogether bars any child from entering this world because there would be no room for him? The child knocks. If we would receive him we are to rethink thoroughly our own attitude toward human life. Here we are dealing with fundamentals, with our very concept of what it means to be human: to live in grandiose selfishness or in confident freedom that knows its vocation to be united in love, to be free to accept one another.

George H. Kubeck, *Co-Workers of the Truth, Meditations for Every Day, J.C. Ratzinger, Dec. 22-24