A few words from my friends on Christmas Eve...

From Blue Eyed Ennis comes two moving insights on the mystery of God's grace made flesh.  The first is from Mary Oliver:
Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous
to be understood.

How grass can be nourishing in the
mouths of the lambs.
 How rivers and stones are forever
in allegiance with gravity
while we ourselves dream of rising.

 How two hands touch and the bonds
will never be broken.

 How people come, from delight or the
scars of damage,
to the comfort of a poem.

Let me keep my distance, always, from those
who think they have the answers.

Let me keep company always with those who say
"Look!" and laugh in astonishment,
and bow their heads.

Then a restatement of the Ave Maria (from the Italian):

Woman of waiting
Mother of hope
Woman of smiles
Mother of silence
Woman of the margins
Mother of Love
Woman of rest
Mother of the journey
Woman of the desert
Mother of Breath
Woman of the evening
Mother of memories
 Woman of this moment
and Mother of the past
Woman on Earth
Mother of Love
 Ave Maria : Hail Mary

Ora Pro Nobis : Pray for us

From Fr. Richard Rohr comes these words that get it just about right, too:

In 1847, a parish priest in  France asked a simple wine merchant in his church if he would compose a poem  for the Christmas Mass. He wrote the words to the music that became O Holy  Night and will be sung with great solemnity and emotion in many halls and  churches throughout the world tonight. It deserves to be.

I offer this song because of  one truly inspired line. It says that when God came among us in the shape and  form of Jesus, suddenly “the soul felt its worth!” Yes, that is it! We  cannot mirror ourselves; we all must be mirrored by another. When God mirrored  us through the entrance, invitation, and eyes of Jesus, the certainty of our  redemption was once and for all given and accomplished. In Franciscan  eyes, we needed no further blood sacrifice to reveal God's intentions toward  us. We were already saved by the gaze from the manger.

The poet goes on to sing further of “a thrill of hope”  and a “new and glorious morn.” Again, well said, as poets and musicians so  often do! I am sure much of the conscious or unconscious sentiment of this  feast is that tonight and tomorrow, on some wonderful level, the soul finally  and forever does feel its worth!

Let me close with the insights from the St. of Vermont:  Frederick Buechner:

The Word became Flesh, wrote St. John, "and dwelt among us full of grace and truth." (John 1: 14) That is what incarnation means. It is untheological. It is unsophisticated. It is undignified. But according to Christianity it is the way things are.

All religions and philosophies which deny the reality or the significance of the material, the fleshly, the earth-bound, are themselves denied. Moses at the burning bush was told to take off his shoes because the ground on which he stood was holy ground (Exodus 3: 5), and incarnation means that all ground is holy ground because God not only made it but walked on it, ate and slept and worked and died on it. If we are saved anywhere, we are saved here.

And what is saved is not some diaphanous distillation of our bodies and our earth but our bodies and our earth themselves. Jerusalem becomes the New Jerusalem coming down out of Heaven like a bride adorned for her husband (Revelation 21: 2). Our bodies are sown perishable and raised imperishable (I Corinthians 15: 42)

One of the blunders religious people are particularly fond of making is the attempt to be more spiritual than God.

God's grace to you all:  tidings of comfort and joy and Merry Christmas, dear friends, Merry Christmas!