Christmas Day
Richard Rohr describes why celebrating Christmas and the Incarnation of Jesus is foundational to Franciscan spirituality:
In the first 1200 years of Christianity, the central feast or celebration was Easter, with the high holy days of Holy Week leading up to the celebration of the resurrection of Christ. But in the thirteenth century, Francis of Assisi entered the scene. He intuited that we didn’t need to wait for God to love us through the cross and resurrection. Francis believed the whole thing started with incarnate love. He popularized what we now take for granted as Christmas, which for many became the major Christian feast. Christmas is the Feast of the Incarnation when we celebrate God taking human form in the birth of Jesus.
Francis realized that since God had become flesh—having taken on materiality, physicality, humanity—then we didn’t have to wait for Good Friday and Easter to “solve the problem” of human sin: the problem was solved from the beginning. It makes sense that Christmas became the great celebratory feast of Christians because it basically says that it’s good to be human, it’s good to be on this Earth, it’s good to have a body, it’s good to have emotions. We don’t need to be ashamed of any of it! God loves matter and physicality.
With that insight, it’s no wonder Francis went wild over Christmas. (I do too—my little house is filled with candles at Christmastime.) Francis believed that trees should be decorated with lights to show their true status as God’s creations, and that’s exactly what we still do eight hundred years later.
And there’s more: when we speak of Advent or preparing for Christmas, we’re not just talking about waiting for the little baby Jesus to be born. That already happened two thousand years ago. In fact, we’re welcoming the Universal Christ, the Cosmic Christ, the Christ that is forever being born (incarnating) in the human soul and into history.
We have to make room for such a mystery, because right now there is “no room in the inn.” We see things pretty much in their materiality, but we don’t see the light shining through. We don’t see the incarnate spirit that is hidden inside of everything material.
The early Eastern Church made it very clear that the Incarnation of Christ manifests a universal principle. Incarnation meant not just that God became Jesus, but that God said yes to the material universe and physicality itself. Eastern Christianity understands the mystery of incarnation in the universal sense. In some sense, it is always Advent because God is forever coming into the world (see John 1:9).
We’re always waiting to see Spirit revealing itself through matter. We’re always waiting for matter to become a new form in which Spirit is revealed. Whenever that happens, we’re celebrating Christmas. The gifts of incarnation just keep coming! Perhaps this is enlightenment.
Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, “An Advent Meditation with Richard Rohr,” Center for Action and Contemplation, December 2017, YouTube video, 4:38.
Image credit and inspiration: Maciej Wodzyński, untitled (detail), 2020, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. Both the summer daisy and the winter freeze exist as exhalations of God, each a shining expression of the divine unfolding—from the cosmos to the incarnation of Jesus.
Story from Our Community:
When wandering mountains and canyons, God speaks to me. I learned from the quaking aspens, lifting high their last autumnal bouquet of gold. In the music of a waterfall’s merest trickle, I learned of my soul’s own mystery. I discovered a bird that sings a melody so hauntingly beautiful that one is nearly spellbound. This became for me the mountain sparrow that “builds its nest on God’s altar” as the Psalmist tells us. If I can replicate even a few small notes of the songs my heart is singing, I can share in speaking to the world of God’s greatness and unlimited generosity.
—Anne W.
