Reality check

Actually, this lovely little article by scholar George Weigel is probably more of a supernatural check, with reminders of what should be some basics of faith…..but somehow got shoved aside in our frenetic world. Like what it tells us that God came into the world as the smallest and most vulnerable of one of us.

This special capacity of babies to drain the rest of us of egocentricity and cynicism helps explain why God decided to enter the world as a newborn.

Because we certainly would have done it differently, wouldn’t we? If any of us were God, I doubt we’d have chosen to be born in less-than-optimal obstetrical circumstances in a ramshackle village on the far edge of the civilized world. Indeed, were any of us God, would we have chosen to go through the normal human drill of growing up, with its seemingly endless frustrations and alarums? Why not just arrive on the scene full-grown, at the height of our divine/human powers?

…By coming into the world and its history as a newborn, Emmanuel, from the beginning, begins to draw the lives he touches out of themselves and into self-giving love.

Self-giving love is the antidote to the world’s troubles, a fact that’s simple but not simplistic.

In an interview on German television before his return home in the autumn of 2006, Pope Benedict suggested that “it’s become more difficult to believe because the world in which we find ourselves is completely made up of ourselves.” That’s a crowded place, that world in which there is only us — which, primarily, means, “only me.” A world made up of me, myself, and I — and those few others I occasionally deign to let into my “space” — is a closed and claustrophobic world. And one of the goods that’s shut out of such a world is love.

That rings true, doesn’t it? 

In that same interview, the Holy Father noted that “Christianity, Catholicism, isn’t a collection of prohibitions: it’s a positive option.” It’s an option for love, for that radical self-giving and receptivity in which both giver and receiver are mysteriously enhanced. It’s an option for losing oneself in order to find the truth about each of us: that our human and spiritual fulfillment comes through making ourselves into the gifts for others that our lives are to us.

Something to dwell on:

Christianity isn’t about our search for God. Like its parent, Judaism, Christianity is about God’s search for us, and our learning to take the same path through history that God does.

And that takes the humility of God. Which - as Teresa of Avila and Mother Teresa have both pointed out – is more powerful than any other force.