God became man to be close to men. Despite this, unfortunately, most people see Him as a distant reality. He, in point of fact, remains so unpredictable and discrete as to seem elusive. For us believers, instead, God is a presence who is increasingly real and concrete. And this year too, for us, Christmas brings with itself a new grandeur: Christ is present.
This is the meaning of our closeness: we are for one another the sign of His presence. This we are objectively, regardless of our personal condition or our feelings. And so, a characteristic of Christmas becomes the joy and gladness that come from recognizing that we are called together. This recognition, in fact, continuously opens to something greater: embracing our brothers, we recognize who Christ is, but above all that He is here, today.
That baby placed in the manger in Bethlehem was already the beginning of a new world.
The awareness of the reason for our being together -called together by Christ Himself, by the event of His Incarnation- makes us capable of facing the storms of existence. In the poem The Hearth, Giovanni Pascoli imagines a night of storm, full of snow and lighting. The persons are walking, but they do not know where because they do not have a reason for their existence. At a certain point, a streak of lightning greater than the others illuminates a house. One by one the men enter it. They warm themselves with the breath of the others. Then, however, they return to the open air and each one takes up his own path, in the frigid night. For us, instead, it is different: we are not alone. We can be secure that we will live in the house of the Lord all of our days and the certainty that God is with us makes goodness and mercy our companions, as Psalm 23 says.
Made strong by the companionship of the Lord, we do not face existence with our head lowered, as if we had to take on every obstacle, but we place ourselves in the environment where we are like new yeast. After all, the great novelty introduced by Christianity always affirms itself beginning from very small things. What is smaller than a baby? And yet, for Mary and Joseph, just like for the shepherds, that baby placed in the manger in Bethlehem was already the beginning of a new world. Most people were not even aware of His birth. Caesar Augustus continued to be emperor and Herod continued to be a petty tyrant, but Jesus constituted the beginning of a new humanity. At the same time, our small fellowship is for the life of the world, to anticipate in time, in this world, what our definitive fulfillment will be. The condition to realize this task is that of “surrendering” to Christmas, to the physical presence of God. Christmas calls us to develop a mature judgment of the esteem we have towards our companionship and towards the Church. It means learning to expect everything from the place in which we have been called and welcomed.
