The Lord’s Invincible Love

Fr. Maurice Péloquin

If, every year, we celebrate the feast of Christmas with a renewed joy and conviction, that is because the Lord’s coming is not an event of the past. God came, but He comes and comes again incessantly, and it is always new, always actual. He comes knocking at each one’s door to offer him love and joy, while waiting to return in order to transfigure the entire universe.

He comes in the spiritual joy of the Eucharist and in the festive gatherings of our fraternal banquets. But He also comes in our worries, our difficulties and our setbacks. It is true that we recognize Him more when He comes in the joys and in the daily duties of our state. We can also guess it when He comes in the secrecy of our hearts, in that which is the most intimate and incommunicable within us, as well as in what we have that is the poorest, the most wretched, in that which in us is the most obscure. God comes without cease in order to cause His light to shine in all we are and in all our actions. Yes, we were created by God, created to be united with Him in immortal bonds of love.

And precisely on this feast of Christmas, the Lord comes to tell each and every one of us that He loves us in a way that is not at all like all we tag on to the word “love”. He loves us with a love that is infinite, gratuitous, generous, paternal and maternal at the same time. And it is His joy to love us in this way. Through His love, He comes to awaken what is asleep in us, resurrect what is dead, uplift what is weighed down, what no longer dares look up to heaven. He comes to save the trinity of our three bodies which He created in His image and likeness.

Even if we are only slightly open to grace, we realize every day just how little we know how to love, just how much we are to be pitied because our life is not open enough to God and to His will. We realize that our life is quite hollow, so little able to give, to abandon itself and to pardon. We need to have someone come and awaken in us that power to love, that capacity to be happy, the grace of brimming over with love and general rejoicing. Therefore, someone must come and teach us how to go about being happy, how to give our hearts, how to sow joy, how we are to go about giving of ourselves and living in purity and light. There you have all what this little Child comes to teach us. This little Child is bursting with the desire to share His love with us, to teach us to love as He does, for there is no other way for us to be happy.

On this night, God comes. Let us not close our hearts, close our spirits. In the silence of the night, let us listen to those hymns that speak to us of love, peace, simplicity, lowliness and of a childlike spirit. However this way of the spiritual childhood is a very serious reality and not just some sort of watered down spirituality that would exempt us from making any effort... On the contrary, this way of the spiritual childhood urges us to follow Christ, that is to say, to reproduce in our lives what He lived. It is an invitation to truly become sons of the heavenly Father. To become His son or daughter means accepting to love as He loved, to render good for evil, for God lets the sun rise on those who are bad as well as on those who are good.

This way of the spiritual childhood requires that we act for the benefit of others and not to gain their approval or so that they will repay the service, but solely because we know that this is our Father’s joy as well as the full and mysterious fulfillment of our humanity in the accomplishing of His will. We must not have any illusions. The first Christmas was not one where there were figurines, decorated  evergreens with gifts piled underneath them. The first Christmas was a pregnant woman who was refused at the inn and who was forced to find shelter in the corner of a stable; it was a child refused the warmth of a roof over its head; it was an underrated family... The first Christmas was the revelation of a God who took upon Himself the humiliation of humanity. There you have what God’s invincible love does; there you have the spirit of childhood taking root in our humanity! This word received from the faith ought to render our existence uncomfortable, otherwise our celebration of Christmas is nothing more  than a few dreams of material and passing delights.

Christmas has us examine ourselves on the manner in which we treat a child and, in general, the one who is weak, sickly, not useful in the eyes of a mercantile society. We are called, each one of us, to look upon the children and the poor people of our milieu with the eyes of God. This means that celebrating the childhood of God is a call to place our mentality in the wake of God’s will, recalled at the time of His Son’s birth.

That mentality sets before us the passion God has of passing on His goodness and His mercy. For the child born at Christmas time was not sent into the world to condemn it, but to save it. He was born to redeem, to purify and to make of all of us chosen ones for heaven. God’s logic does not produce the exclusion of anyone who would not be in conformity, but it appeals to our freedom so that each one may be reborn in that which is the truest, the best part of himself. In truth, if we do not become like this little Child, we will not enter the Kingdom of God. (Cf. Lk 18:15-17) This evening, more than ever, the glory of God and the peace of men have merged. What we are celebrating is a joy consisting of purity and freedom of heart, that of childhood and new beginnings.

The world was hoping for the restoring of a people, and here, to our astonishment, God is restoring our own life in His likeness.  However, for God to take shape in us in order to restore us, we must adopt the attitude of Mary, the all-humble and the all-pure. Like Angelus Silesius, we could say: “I must be Mary and bring God to birth from within me and He will grant me His eternal blessing.”¹

Father Maurice Péloquin

1. Angelius Silesius in Maria, Études sur la Vierge Marie, tome II, Hubert du Manoir, S.J., Beauchesne, Paris, 1951, p. 77.