Merry Christmas!
Christmas Blessings from the CArmelite Hermitage
Christmas 2023
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
We wish you and your families a Merry Christmas! We are praying for you during these days in which we celebrate the birth of Christ. May God bless you with many gifts of grace and may you find peace in the stable of Bethlehem. Below you will find a little Christmas meditation inspired by St. John of the Cross and his poem the Romances.
In these days many gifts will be exchanged, it reminds us that we must take time to think about the gift God has given us in his Son, Jesus. Embracing the Christ child, we also must give a gift in return - our very selves to God in adoration of his Son.
Christ is born for us! Come, let us adore him!
Sincerely,
The Carmelite Hermits
A Christmas Meditation
Romances, Stanza 9
The Christmas mystery is an event that never ceases to incite wonder in the hearts of anyone who pauses even for a moment to contemplate the reality of what has transpired. In his Romances, St. John of the Cross speaks of “things usually so strange” as he describes the exchange that took place in the birth of Christ. In Jesus, God and man are wonderfully united. Now, God is no longer a stranger to human suffering and man in his suffering is no longer estranged from the happiness for which he was created.
The stanza above, taken from the Romances, is the climactic ending to the Carmelite mystic’s epic in verse which narrates the plan of salvation as it poured forth from the inner life of the Trinity into human creation and the world in which the Bride lives. It is a love story. The Father seeing the goodness and beauty of his only Son wanted to communicate and share his joy with someone else. That other one would be a Bride whom God would form for his Son. The Bride is creation, human and angelic, but especially man and woman created after the image of God’s own Son. John of the Cross records the desire of the Eternal Father as he speaks secret counsels to his Only Begotten:
“My Son, I wish to give you a bride who will love you. Because of you she will deserve to share our company, and eat at our table, the same bread I eat, that she may know the good I have in such a Son; and rejoice with me in your grace and fullness.” (Romances, Stanza 3).
The Son’s response to his Father is: “I am very grateful.” The Son, the second person of the Trinity, will go on to explain how he will show his brightness to the Bride given to him. In this light, the Bride will discover the greatness of the Father, and she will burn with love, exalting in the goodness of God with eternal delight. The thought of St. John of the Cross in these Romances is that God, from all eternity, wanted to exalt humanity – all men and women created in his image and likeness – to himself! Human creation is the Bride prepared for the Eternal Word of the Father. From the start, God had a wonderful plan to unite humanity to himself. It is a nuptial mystery.
The Father, knowing all things and the wisdom of his plan, decides with his Son: “Let it be done, then!” (Romances, Stanza 4). This is the fiat (let it be done in Latin) which brought all things into existence in the beginning: “Fiat Lux!”, that is, “let there be light!” At the fullness of time the Virgin Mary, when called upon by God through the angel Gabriel to become the Mother of God’s Only Son, echoes that fiat with her: “let it be to me according to your word.” (Lk 1, 38). It is also the fiat of the Incarnate Word who says: “Behold, I come; in the roll of the book it is written of me; I delight to do your will, O my God; your law is within my heart.” (Ps 40, 7-8). With the “Yes” of the Father, and of the Son, the plan for union between the human and divine in Christ begins. There is also Mary’s consent which is a “Yes” made on behalf of all humanity. With mutual consent, among all the parties involved, the nuptials between God and man now transpires in the Incarnation. John of the Cross captures the mystery of the Word made Flesh in verse:
“Then he called the archangel Gabriel and sent him to the virgin Mary, at whose consent the mystery was wrought, in whom the Trinity clothed the Word with flesh. And though Three work this, it is wrought in the One; and the Word lived incarnate in the womb of Mary.” (Stanza 8).
The wonder of this mysterious event is that the One “who had only a Father now had a Mother too…” This One is thus called: Son of God and of man. God throughout the whole of salvation history has wanted to bestow this gift upon his children. He has dropped hints (in all the types of the Old Testament and especially in the Prophets) all along the way like a father who is trying to indicate some hidden gift in the house for his little ones to find on Christmas morning. The Father is saying on this Christmas morn: here is my gift, here is my Son who is both God and man!
Mary was the first to hold the gift in her arms, the Mystery of God and Man made one in her Son. The Romances once more speak of the beauty of what has transpired:
“When the time had come for him to be born, he went forth like the bridegroom from his bridal chamber, embracing his bride, holding her in his arms, whom the gracious Mother laid in a manger among some animals that were there at that time.” (Stanza 9).
Mary’s womb is the chaste bridal chamber from which Bridegroom and Bride would come forth into the world and be placed in a humble manger. St. John of the Cross describes the union between the human and the divine in the person of Jesus Christ, the Son of God and of Mary, as a kind of nuptial union. The Bridegroom is the divine nature and the Bride human nature. Pausing now at such a tremendous truth our eyes open to see what Mary the Mother saw: God shedding tears because he now possesses our own nature; and, our nature rejoicing in the God who has taken all our sorrows upon himself. The baby Jesus takes our sorrows and gives us in turn his joy – the Father whose only desire for us this Christmas is to be glad in his Son! With the Mother, then, let us gaze in sheer wonder at so wondrous an exchange!