Fr. Don’s Christmas Letter ~ 25 December 2024

Dear Good People of Saint Bernadette,

(continued from Sunday, December 22)

We want so badly to think that we are all we need and we can have God all figured out, but we aren’t, and we can’t. And that is okay because that is who God is and who we are, but it doesn’t mean give up. It means go to work on that relationship and try to find the reason why all this is happening.

We are frustrated in our failure to learn how, when we should be focusing on why. Not how Christmas, but why Christmas? And, by extension, not how Eucharist, but why?

Not how God is a friend, a companion, a savior, but why: God is Love Itself. And how unlikely and relatively impossible that would seem from our human perspective!

God is not a being. God is Being Itself.

If God stopped thinking of us we would cease to be.

But God chose to do everything for us because God is Love. Because of his giving us life and of his love, we must go to work rather than give up. (Did you know that in the Greek of Jesus’ time the word for “work” was “liturgy?”)

So, to become us he became who we are, not who we would like to be. He became a human baby, completely humble, helpless, and absolutely, irresistibly loveable. He reveals to us how he regards us and who we are in the way in which he becomes us in Jesus Christ.

When you look at Jesus in complete poverty in a trough for feeding animals who do you see? Hopefully, I see myself. Also I realize there is a plan because the One whose plan is unfolding contains a lot of unknowns, but the one thing certain is that he is Love. Don’t waste time on how, just focus on why.

As I have been reflecting on the nature of salvation in recent bulletins, the work of God’s redemption was not something new. It was a restoration of what was already the intention of God’s creation interrupted by our sin. The first Adam and the first Eve walked with God in the garden. (Again, let’s not focus on the how, but the why.) They beheld God, but they didn’t really know him and were swayed (maybe easily, or maybe with great deliberation) by the temptation of the devil to think they had God all figured out. The snake-thinking was pride, and they decided they were greater than they were. God was trying to keep them from being like Godself, to keep all the power for himself. That is what the devil does, he twists the truth and calls it truth. If God is the same as us, then why not? We can be him. The irony was, and I think this is important, they already were in union with their Creator, though creatures, according to God’s plan. To be human is to be okay: look at Jesus in the manger, Creator and creature. (Again, let’s not focus on the how, but the why.)

So sin happened, pride, “human” was no longer good enough, and they had to hide.

Creator and creature, divine and human... look and see that already in Jesus creation is being restored, to be completed on the
Cross and empty tomb, but well under-way. Why? because God is Love, and Jesus is love incarnate, completely humble, helpless, and absolutely, irresistibly loveable. Worry about how as the gift of time unfolds, the invention of human science, which seeks to explain the unexplainable.

The world needs to re-see this unfolding story of salvation, not as some kind of analytical crisis, but as an act of love from God, who is Love.

Merry Christmas to you and your loved ones!

The Lord be with you.