Merry Christmas - From a Certain Point of View

Merry Christmas!

However you keep this beautiful feast day, this celebration of life, the greatest Life to grace our sometimes dismal surroundings, here's some perspective to lend, I hope, a bit more spiritual color to this great day.

First, here's how the Roman Martyrology tries to capture the day, within a specific context:

"In the year 5199th from the creation of the world, when in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, in the year 2957th from the flood, in the year 2015th from the birth of Abraham, in the year 1510th from the going forth of the people of Israel out of Egypt under Moses, in the year 1032th from the anointing of David as King, in the 65th week according to the prophecy of Daniel, in the 194th Olympiad, in the 752nd from the foundation of the city of Rome, in the 42nd year of the reign of the Emperor Octavian Augustus, in the 6th age of the world, while the whole earth was at peace, Jesus Christ, Himself Eternal God and Son of the Eternal Father, being pleased to hallow the world by His most gracious coming, having been conceived of the Holy Ghost, and when nine months were passed after His conception, (all kneel down) was born of the Virgin Mary at Bethlehem of Juda made Man, Our Lord Jesus Christ was born according to the flesh."

We don't have to accept that the world was created 6,000 before the birth of Christ to appreciate the fact that Christ was born at a particular point in a long expanse of history - on a specific day, in a specific place. (While the beginning of the world may have been a bit earlier, it's not at all improbable that the other precedents took place as stated.) But, more important, we should understand and accept that Jesus Christ was born for all of us, to save us from our sins. As the angels announced to the shepherds, "For this day is born to you a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord..."

And if that chronology, or those words of angels aren't enough to inculcate and bolster a spiritual appreciation of Christmas, consider this from The Inner Life of the Soul a Catholic work published at the beginning of the 20th century, written by a perceptive, sensitive fellow, a work I've read over in recent years:

"Send back the shepherds to the hill-tops, to wonder and then to sleep. Let the beasts in the lowly stable close their blessed eyes, that have seen such sights to-night as creatures never saw before. Let the moon sink beneath the hills, and darkness cover the earth, and silence brood like the Spirit-dove above it. Then let us think of the happiest and holiest of mothers, alone with her God, Who is her Child. Let us kneel also in that darkness, away from friend and companion, earth's joys and lights put from us, and let us entreat Mary, our Mother, to share with us the rapture of the divine poverty, the divine loneliness, the divine darkness of that Christmas night. Do you think she would have exchanged one moment of it for all earth's warmth and household joys and costly gifts to-day?

Each of us has a mother. Mary was the mother of Jesus. Doesn't this perceptively capture what Mary, as a mother, might have experienced on that first night in Bethlehem? Despite the cold, the surroundings, having to lay her Baby in a manger - a feeding trough for animals - this mother could lay all that aside. All she could see, touch, and hear was her child. All she wanted to see, touch, and hear was her child. Makes sense, doesn't it?

So there it is, two ways to look at Christmas, to provide maybe a little different perspective from the worldly mish-mash that wraps Christmas in a gaudy package that will flash and burn in a mere few days, if that long . I hope it helps you to find something a little more lasting, something that can help you to want to keep Jesus in your life once the joy of this Christmas Day, 2020, slips into the past.

Merry Christmas!