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- Merry Christmas! -
It is here, in the thing that happened at the first
Christmas, that the most profound unfathomable depths of the Christian revelation lie. God became human… the Almighty appeared on earth as a helpless human baby, unable to do more than lie and stare and wriggle and make noises, needing to be fed and changed and taught to talk like any other child… The more you think about it, the more staggering it gets. Nothing in fiction is so fantastic as this truth of the incarnation. - James I (J. I.) Packer
(Give thanks for God's gift of revelation through Jesus.) |
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- Mass during the day -
IS 62:11-12;
PS 97:1, 6, 11-12; 2 TI 3:4-7
LK 2:15-20
When the angels went away from them to heaven,
the shepherds said to one another,
"Let us go, then, to Bethlehem
to see this thing that has taken
place,
which the Lord has made known to us."
So they went in haste and found Mary and Joseph,
and the infant lying in the manger.
When they saw this,
they made known the message
that had been told them about this child.
All who heard it were amazed
by what had been told them by the shepherds.
And Mary kept all these things,
reflecting on them in her heart.
Then the shepherds returned,
glorifying and praising God
for all they had heard and
seen,
just as it had been told to them.
USCCB lectionary
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Reflection on the Scripture |
The Bible is the most unpredictable book ever written. The
first words from God's Word for the Christmas Day Mass are: "How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of Him Who brings glad tidings, announcing peace, bearing good news, announcing salvation" (Is 52:7). When everyone else is thinking about gaudy extravagance, God is talking about beautiful feet. These feet are beautiful because they bring the good news of peace (Is 52:7). After centuries of chaos, we can finally have shalom-peace, perfect harmony through salvation from sin, death, slavery,
and Satan. This is accomplished not by our mere human efforts but by the God-King (Is 52:7).
Amazingly and once again unpredictably, the God-King is also the Infant-King, Jesus. Jesus is our Peace (Eph 2:14) and our Savior. He has become a Son of Man so we may become sons and daughters of God and even "sharers of the divine nature" (2 Pt
1:4). All we have to do is accept Him on His terms as Savior, King, Lord, and God. "To His own He came, yet His own did not accept Him. Any who did accept Him He empowered to become children of God" (Jn 1:11-12). Now, Christmas Day, "is the acceptable time! Now is the day of salvation!" (2 Cor 6:2)
Prayer: Jesus, I give my life to You. I decide to do Your will and not mine, to live for You and not
for myself.
Promise: "In times past, God spoke in fragmentary and varied ways to our fathers through the prophets; in this, the final age, He has spoken to us through His Son." —Heb 1:1-2
Praise: "The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us" (Jn 1:14). Alleluia!
Presentation Ministries
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From Meditation to Contemplation, by James Arraj - Reprinted from St. John of the Cross and Dr. C. G. Jung.
The Experience of Infused Contemplation
Contemplation does not come through the senses and thus to the rational faculties following the usual pattern of knowing, but rather it comes from
behind, so to speak. It is infused directly into the rational faculties at their root, or center, so that the person receiving this knowledge does not understand how it got there except that it is the work of God and the presence of God. The basic human orientation of the rational faculties to knowledge which is sense-related plays havoc with the reception of contemplative knowledge; the whole tonality of the intellect looks towards the senses, and effectively blinds it to knowledge coming in
any other way. It is literally looking in the wrong direction and does not know that there is another direction, and if it did know of this other direction, it would look at it with its conceptualizing and discriminating eyes and thus not see anything. “So delicate is this refreshment that ordinarily, if a man have desire or care to experience it, he experiences it not; for, as I say, it does its work when the soul is most at ease and freest from care; it is like the air which, if one would
close one’s hand upon it, escapes.”(“Dark Night of the Soul,” 1, 9, 6)
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