Monday, July 25, 2016

CHRISTMAS IN JULY

‘It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas…’ so the song goes, but is it?  The other day, while I was surfing the TV channels, I came across a Christmas movie on Hallmark.  In July?  With all this heat?  There is another Christmas song, ‘Why can’t we have Christmas the whole year around, why can’t we have Christmas the whole year around.’ 

When we think of Christmas we tend to think of the baby Jesus and gifts.  Not Blessed Celeste.  She speaks of Jesus’ incarnation as how Jesus crossed  “…an abyss in which the angels still get lost, that humiliation he underwent as God when, in the first instant of his incarnation, he lowered himself to take human flesh, and, though God, became a man.”  Most times Celeste speaks of the God-Man, Man-God, and his “…admirable excess of Divine Love,” that led him to the cross. 

That is what Jesus’ incarnation, his living, dying and rising was all about: an excess of Divine Love.  The reason why Celeste speaks of Christ in the present tense: living, rising, dying, is to call us to participation in the Intent of the Father, through our joyful participation in and union with the Life of Jesus  as the on-going carrying out of God’s loving plan of redemption.  

How can we have Christmas, live the incarnation, the whole year around? 

News flash:  we are human.  Invariably, as people living together, we grate on each other with our failings and foibles.  As Redemptoristines, we open the gift of excessive Divine Love given to us by God to lift us beyond our imperfections and eccentricities and humanly, humbly give the gift of love and understanding to one another.


To help us keep Christmas in our hearts all year around we would do well to receive the gift excessive Divine Love at the beginning of the day by invoking, in Jesus words to Celeste, “the Holy Spirit as a memorial of the hour of my Incarnation, because at that hour the sunrise of the divine Sun rose upon the world and warmed on the earth the Dew of the Grace of the Holy Spirit on all my creatures.”  

So, I wish you a Merry Christmas, in July.  Let us renew the gift of our vows to live the incarnation the whole year around.