Don't forget who you are!

Homily
Christmas Mass During the Day
25 December 2012
St. Frances Cabrini Parish - Hoxie, Kansas
Daily Readings

O come let us adore him, Christ the Lord!

We have come on Christmas morning to adore the infant Jesus.  Today we celebrate the morning when the world first saw the face of God, the true light of the world.  Born of the virgin mother, he is the firstborn of the new creation!  In former times, no one could see the face of God and live.  But now, with the appearance of the child Jesus, through whom eternity entered time, we live in the fullness of time where to see the face of God, which beginning today is also a human face, is to begin to truly live.  God who owes us nothing has shown us his face!  To see the face of God, to live in this light, represents the new highest dignity of man, and it is in this light that man truly finds himself.  We have come then, to adore this Christ child and all that he makes possible.  In him, mankind is moving decidedly not toward its eventual destruction, but onward and forward to its highest glory!  Through Mary, the exemplar of our Church and the first to see Jesus, we have come to fall in love once again with God, who in the circumstances of Bethlehem shows himself to be so deeply in love with us!

The welcoming of the baby Jesus occurs this year, as we well know, while the flags of our nation are at half-mast, mourning the loss of her children.  Newtown is but the most recent and vivid  and terrible example of how Christ’s victory over evil has yet to be fully extended, especially when it comes to protecting the most vulnerable children among us.  The reality of this evil hit so hard that headlines immediately began asking the question ‘where was God?’  With all due honor to those grieving families whose faith was damaged by the horrible evil that took place, and who wake up on Christmas morning with unspeakable sadness, still the news media had only to go to the nearest Christian church to see where God was.  There on display were thousands of candles proclaiming that despite the worst evil, life is still worth living, and the darkness will never overcome the light.  There on display were nativity scenes, showing that God does not distance himself from the vulnerability of being a helpless child.  There on display in Catholic Churches was the crucifix, showing the broken and lifeless body of Jesus who did not think it beneath him to place himself in the midst of the worst kind of evil.  There in the churches was the answer that has always been there since the first Christmas.  There in the churches was the answer that will always be there.  God is Emmanuel – he is with us.  In every situation, especially in the worst situations man can endure, God himself is there.  He is with us.  He goes before us.  He walks besides us, even to the very depths of hell.

Christmas is a unique time to enter into the truth that we only know who we are when we remember where we came from.  By this I am not talking only of happy reunions and the exchange of gifts with family, as important as these are.  I am talking specifically about the need for us always to be a child, and to always find ourselves in our encounter with the Christ child, and of our society to always judge itself from the view of the child.  The reality of the richest and most powerful man ever, the Son of God, the one through whom all things were made, being born cold, outside, poor and bound in swaddling clothes reminds us of what is essential to being a human person.  Our sacred dignity as persons comes first of all not from our eventual freedom of intelligence and will, but most fundamentally because someone knows us and loves us and protects us from the moment of our conception onwards, where we cannot know and love and protect ourselves.  These secondary realities of freedom of intelligence and will, which emerge fully in adulthood, and the ability to shape our own destiny, are nothing really, are almost a mirage, when compared to the reality of being a child.  The Christ child reminds us that to be human is to be poor, vulnerable and dependent; namely, to let one’s self receive love.  If we know who we are, we know we never stop being children.  We forget this, and neglect it, to the peril of our own dignity as persons, for to forget where you came from, is to forget who you are.

So too in our society, our Holy Father urges us not to forget where we came from.  A person without memory loses much of his identity.  So too a society that constantly tries to manufacture its own reality, rather than receiving and discovering the true nature of what it means to be human, is a society destined to lose its humanity.  We have societies with millions of smart phones, for example, that are not smart enough to stop contracepting their society and economies out of existence.  It is fashionable to be more organic regarding our food and our energy, but less organic in what makes us even more human, our sexuality.  By eschewing natural chastity and natural family planning for artificial contraception and abortion, we run away from what makes us most human  - authentic natural, vulnerable, sacrificial and fruitful love.  We can run away from defining the family based on how it most naturally occurs in human nature, through the birth of a child to a man and woman who give everything to each other, including their natural fertility.  We can even seek to expand marriage by doing something insanely unnatural, by subtracting sexual complementarity from the definition, and to shift the definition away from the view of the child, and toward the will of the adults.  This to forget where we came from, to forget we are all children, and to deny who we really are.  A culture more afraid of babies and who seeks to artificially eliminate babies, and who does not see itself through the desire of its children to born, is a culture that has lost its humanity.

We have to stop trying to manufacture what we were meant to discover and receive.  The vulnerability of the Christ child teaches us the most important lesson we must never forget. To become a human person is to become known, and loved and protected.  It is to be poor and vulnerable.  To be human is to never stop being a child, and this sacred dignity of human persons can only ultimately be guaranteed by God, who can know us, love us, and protect us from the evils of the world in ways no one else can, from the moment of our conception until natural death.  The birth of Jesus from the virgin mother is the sign of the dawn of a new creation that begins in poverty but ends in riches, that begins with vulnerability to evil but ends with everlasting goodness, a creation that is first touched by death but ends in everlasting life.  This is the new creation that as St. John says, is not born of natural generation, but of God, grace upon grace.  The sign of this new creation appears for us today in Bethlehem.

To adore the Christ child on Christmas must mean nothing less than to fall in love with this new creation, with God, and with humanity once again.  Christ comes in the most irresistible of forms, as a helpless baby, to try to win us over to finding ourselves again.  Yet if we do not remember where we came from, we will reject him tonight.  To win us over, Christ is willing this morning to lower  himself even further than asking us to imagine ourselves at Bethlehem.  He comes to us right here, today, where we are, and allows us to receive him even more intimately under our roofs, through the gift of the Holy Eucharist.  That’s why the ultimate test of what this Christmas means for us, and for our world, is coming in just a few moments.  The birth of Jesus into our world reaches its most radical extension and conclusion in the Eucharist we are about to receive.  What matters most of all this Christmas is what is about to happen to my mind, and my heart and my body, as Jesus gives himself to me now, for this is truly Christ’s Mass.  Merry Christmas to all!