Christmas Message 2007

I was speaking with a young couple recently who were really looking forward to Christmas with their children. They were wholly caught up in the children’s excitement and their heightened anticipation. Yet they were enjoying the moment while also conscious that there would only be a certain number of Christmases like this - when the children would retain that quality of pure and simple joy. Seasons and feasts, like birthdays and anniversaries, remind us that time goes in cycles and yet is also linear. The same times come round in the great wheel. Yet everything is passing away. Time is an arrow with a relentless direction. Often it seems to be the very mortality and fragility of life that makes every moment so precious and enlivening and why we often find the deepest peace only when we have fully accepted our mortality.

In these coming days we are given another opportunity to enter the mystery at the heart of Christian faith – the unimaginable humility and passionate eros of the Creator in divesting God’s own divinity and, in the subsequent emptiness, pouring boundless love into the narrow and painful limitations of the human. We may need to sit after meditation many times with the words of the prologue of John to allow them truly to awaken the wonder they carry and for that wonder to pervade our lives. St John tells us that “he came to his own” in the world but the world did not recognise him. That is why we meditate – to be able to recognise him even if only a little more clearly each year until the full mystery overwhelms and absorbs us. The Word is eternal but the world is not. Meditation familiarises us with paradox which allows space for this recognition to develop. The “Logos” in Greek means something more like thought or reason. In Hebrew it has more the meaning of speech, the utterance that communicates what is interior. So, it harmonises the inner and outer dimensions of all human consciousness and experience. When we hear and recognise the Word we are lifted into the deep and simple unity of God beyond all the dualities and divisions that cause us pain and lead into fear violence.

So the Word became flesh; he made his home among us and we saw his glory such glory as befits the Father’s only Son, full of grace and truth.

The flesh that the Word took – and takes every instant – does not just mean the material body. It is the whole world in its brokenness and suffering as well as in its joys and boundless beauties. No experience or sensation can now be separated from our source and ultimate goal. By the Incarnation we are held in the divine embrace – embraced not smothered – and we share in the glory which is the fullness of being.

Meditation too, in a very personal and particular way, incarnates us. Only those who don’t know it think that meditation is abstract. The mantra gently taking root in the heart becomes a sacrament of the Incarnation itself, releasing the power of love into us from its very source in us.

We can understand this mystery of faith better through meditation and through the profoundly Christ-centred teaching on the path that John Main left to us and to future generations. Twenty-five years ago it seemed that his work might be over, a brief flash in the pan of the Church’s history. But as we celebrate his memorial Mass at Westminster Cathedral on December 29th – with you whether you will be there in person or not – we will recognise how widely and deeply his teaching and spirit have grown and fed the Church globally. Yes, time is cyclical and linear. Yet in the endings of time we find the eternally new beginning, God’s continuous saying of the Word. We see that time cracks open in the mortal to reveal the present moment. And it is in that ever –present presence that we feel an upswell of thankfulness to God for what was done through Father John and what is happening within the Community that he saw had to take shape as a community of love.

May this Christmas and your celebration of the anniversary fill you with joy and peace and the comfort of friendship.

With much love,

"A Celebration of John Main's Life & Spiritual Legacy"....

Download a PDF file of the special Eucharistic memorial Mass in celebration of John Main's Life and Spiritual Legacy held at Westminster Cathedral, December 29, 2007 here.

Christmas Message in Spanish here.

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