“O God, You Who gladden us year after year with the expectation of our redemption, grant that we, who now welcome with joy Your only-begotten Son as our Redeemer, may also gaze upon Him without fear when He comes as our judge, our Lord Jesus Christ.” (Collect of the Vigil of Nativity)
What is this indescribable joy with which we greet all the
Christmases of our life on earth
Anticipating His coming even before the first days of advent
preparation
The knowledge that God loves us
The evidence of faith
The fact that He joins His divinity to our humanity on this
night of the nativity of the Lord
In such a way that His union with us may never be broken by
sin or any other weakness of our flesh
He humbly entrusts Himself to us in this and in every holy
Mass of our lives: Eucharist, the same true and real Presence witnessed on that
holy night of His birth over 2,000 years ago by Mary and Joseph, the shepherds
and the angels
“Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among men of
good will.”
But with His birth, Risking that He may not be loved with the
worship and adoration which is His due by right as our God
Even suffering so often the outrages and sacrileges of
unbelievers and the pains inflicted by the baptized who betray Him
But we wish this night through our worship of the newborn
Lord to greet Him with this joy which is evidence of our Holy Faith
“The grace of God our Saviour has appeared to all men,
instructing us, in order that, rejecting ungodliness and worldly lusts, we may
live temperately and justly and piously in this world; looking for the blessed
hope and glorious coming of our great God and Saviour, Jesus Christ” (Epistle)
We promise, this Christmas and always, to hold Him up before
an unbelieving world, and to call every creature to fall down in worship, restoring
to creation the rightly ordered love of God which grants also to us the true
charity which only will bring peace on Earth and which only can be the foundation
of the love the world seeks: rooted in God whose mercy in the newborn Savior
will ever be the only source of true hope, hope which finds in His humility the
true lowliness which is ours by nature and the evidence of His condescension:
the King of all will serve by making Himself our gift.
What kind of gift? What treasure? The greatest possible to be
imagined in this mortal flesh: the Eternal life of God through grace.
Yes: this Christmas and every day let us seek Him and knowing
Him here in this gift of His Body and Blood in the Holy Eucharist, each moment
another Christmas; let us know and believe in the true life He shares with us,
that of God without beginning and end;
Thus may our Christmas joy be full at this Christmas and always.
“O God, Who have brightened this most holy night with the
splendor of the true light, grant, we beseech You, that we may know in heaven
the joy of that light which we have known mystically on earth.” (Collect
of Christmas Day)
Merry Christmas!
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