After traveling the Advent journey together – awakeningto hope, learning to welcome, strengthening our hearts with a prophetic spirituality and renewing our availability to the call –we arrive at Christmas.
Today we celebrate that God did not remain at a distance: he has manifested his grace, he has entered our history and has made his dwelling among us.
Christmas is not just a memory; it is a living experience. God continues to be born where life seems fragile, small or wounded, and invites us once again to be reborn filially.
We welcome the Word
Dear brother:
The grace of God has been manifested, bringing salvation to all men, teaching us to renounce ungodliness and worldly desires and to lead a sober, righteous and godly life, awaiting the happiness we hope for and the manifestation of the glory of the great God and our Savior, Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all iniquity and to purify for himself a people of his own, wholly dedicated to good works. (Tt 2:11-14)
This Word reminds us that grace is not something abstract: it has a face, a name and a history. Jesus Christ is born for everyone, he gives himself out of love and teaches us to live from now on in a new way: more free, more just, more dedicated.
Christmas invites us to recognize that salvation is offered to us today, in the concreteness of our life and mission.
Determination illuminates our path
“If sonship is at the heart of Jesus’ identity, the Kingdom of God is the center of his mission. The life of Jesus invites us to be born again (Jn 3:1-21). This spiritual experience is a gift and a task that we are invited to undertake, a filial conversion that does not leave out the wounds and scars that we carry in our history, nor all the good and love that we have given at every stage of life. God continues to make fruitful the charism that we have received as a gift in the Church and encourages us not to let the wick that sometimes seems to be smoldering go out (Is 42:3).” (Determination 11)
Christmas reveals to us the heart of God: a Father-Mother who draws near, who enters our history as it is, with lights and shadows, with wounds and gifts.
To be reborn filially is to accept this grace, to allow God to beget us again in trust, hope and love, without denying what we have lived, but allowing it to transform us.
Resonates in our lives
Christmas opens a new time. God continues to trust us, continues to care for the charism we have received and encourages us not to extinguish the small flame that still burns, even when it seems weak.
To celebrate Christmas is to allow ourselves to be inhabited by this grace and to allow it to be translated into good works, into simple gestures of love, into a life dedicated to the Kingdom.
What grace do you receive from God this Christmas?
May the Child Jesus give us a Christmas full of light, peace and hope, and help us to be reborn, once again, as beloved daughters.
