Today we celebrate the audacious reality of God becoming human. The intermingling of divinity and humanity which allow us a share of God’s divine nature.
Ian Oliver, in a poem titled, A Christmas Prayer, writes that as a result of this “inexpressible” enclosure of divinity and humanity in the one body of Christ, “to be human was never the same, but forever thereafter, carried a hint of its close encounter with the perfect.”
And that is a central part of the message of Christmas. Not just that Christ was born, but that Christ’s birth means something about who we are – about who we can be. For, as Oliver writes,
If God can lie down in a cattle-trough,
Is any object safe from transformation?
If peasant girls can be mothers to God,
Is any life safe from the invasion of the eternal?
If all this could happen, O God,
What places of darkness on our eath
Are pregnant with light waiting to be born this night?
We know the answer to that question. If God can lie down in a cattle-trough and a peasant girl can be mother of God, then, indeed, God can be everywhere and is everywhere waiting to be born. Waiting for each of us to be the mother of God in the world.
Creo en Dios! 