 Love Beyond All Telling
By Brian Grogan, SJ
Christmas is close at hand: its central message is that God is coming into our world because he loves us. The birth of Jesus is a gentle event in one way, but explosive in another: his coming turns everything upside down. Perhaps poets catch the point better than the rest of us: one of them a Latin American, puts it thus: 'I searched for God in the heavens and found him fallen to earth, so now I must search for him among my friends,' Down to Earth In the humdrum of everyday hustle and bustle God is speaking to us. He is intervening in our lives. His constant love and concern for us can be seen if we only took the time to cherish his goodness and love in the various events of our own day. After that, we must admit that God is in our material world. God is in everything that is human. God's history and our history merge together through the Incarnation of the Son of God. Our understanding of God, our world and ourselves is transformed no more and no less than an effort to put words on this transformation.
All things New
At Christmas we sense a difference, a newness, an enlightenment regarding the mystery of the Incarnation of the Son of God and how he is present in the Eucharist. Staying with this awesome thought we will begin to marvel at the manner in which God created the world and how he reveals himself to our understanding with great spiritual joy and we are blessed with an illumination regarding all that we hold holy and spiritual and we have to admit that everything begins to seem new to us.
What does it mean to us when everything seems new to us? It's a puzzling question, isn't it? When Our Lady held her child in her arms, she must have had this sense of 'everything seeming new to her.' God had broken into her life and become its centre. Everything seems new when that happens: a God-event is what brings about the change. The world could seem the same as before, but now that God has entered it, everything is fresh and surprising and has a new meaning. Everyone is unique There's nothing boring about any aspect of human life. 'The world is charged with the grandeur of God' (G. M. Hopkins). Humankind is, as it were, 'plugged into God:' the divine current is energizing every detail of human life from conception to death and into the fullness of eternal life. Because of the incarnation, God can be sought and found in all human beings. Ordinary matters matter infinitely! Can we find the extraordinary hidden behind the ordinary in our own lives? To her neighbors in Nazareth Mary looked like a very ordinary mother, but something extraordinary was going on in her life. The temptation we have is to think that she was extraordinarily graced and that the rest of us are not: the truth is that while Mary has a uniquely intimate relationship with God, God never intended it to create an unbridgeable distance between herself and us. The world is not divided between those who are highly favored by God and those who are not! Mary would want to say to any mother, 'Please don't distance me! Indeed, I am unique and have been specially graced, and my Child is the chosen one of God. But you too are unique: you are specially graced, and your child is a chosen one of God also. As I see it, each one of us in the world is singled out for special attention by God and given - if they can receive it - everything they need to play a special role which no one else can play. Let me walk side-by-side with you and let me support you as you journey along the path of your own uniqueness.'
What me? Special?
This Christmas everything should seem new to us. But the primary thing that should be new should be an appreciation of ourselves. We may seem worldly and materialistic, caught up in our own ambitions and our desires for personal honor and glory, this Christmas we should resolve to think differently. When we do this we will begin to realize, in some small way, how close God really is to us, how deeply God loves us, wants us and blesses us. It's as if we will experience some breathtaking glimpse of the mystery of divinity within ourselves and then in all things human and in the material world too. But this is the mystery of Christmas! The gift is being offered to us this Christmas as he does each time Christmas day comes around. God isn't hiding it from us. He's waiting to be discovered. Frail and limited and sinful though we may be, all of us are in the process of becoming and being revealed as the daughters and sons of God and everything good in the world is provided for us, while everything that is not good is being worked on by God and turned towards our ultimate good. I'm totally loved by God and God is looking after me in every possible way, and so I can rightly spend my life in seeking and finding God in everything.
Transformations
One could go on and on highlighting the many changes that we can make in perspective as we make our inner pilgrimage from our own self-centered little worlds to the limitless world whose centre is God. But the real point is for us to allow God to lead us, with whatever help we can find along the way through our fellow travelers along the same pilgrimage and to the same destination, so that we come to see everything in a new way. Our tiny planet, wending its way among the stars, needs people who love it and its precious inhabitants 'in a different way' which is the way of God. Christmas encapsulates all that God has in store for us - a human being is divine: God is fully present in a human being and desires to be fully present in each one of us. May you, dear reader, experience in this holy season, 'the love that is beyond all telling' and may that gift blossom in responding love. | 
