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Appleton, WI

Dec 24: Day by Day with Father Bill

VIGIL OF THE NATIVITY OF THE LORD
CHRISTMAS EVE

A Christmas Message from Sister Joan Chittister, OSB

The very scandal of Christmas lies in the fact that it sees divinity in humanity. It’s a hard idea to swallow, after all…Only Christianity argues that the Creator has taken on the flesh and blood of creation in order to bring us to assert the divine in ourselves. In the Christmas story we see God become helpless, become like us, become subject to the tensions of growth, become flesh so we might have the confidence to recognize that we have the stuff it takes to become like God. So what is this about renouncing flesh? How can we call the way God made us inherently bad as philosophers have done since the time of Aristotle? The poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning says of it, “Earth is crammed with heaven.” The flesh, in other words, is all we have. It is our glory. It is our power. It is sweet. It is beautiful. And it is the clay out of which we shape a better tomorrow.

Father Bill +