‘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?
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.”
