God's Dream

In the beginning, before light split the darkness for the first time and the waters were gathered into life-giving bodies, before the winds were purposefully directed and the stars and planets assigned their places, before any vegetation or land formation or animals were considered in the mind of God, we were His dream. The Father’s dream of a shared life with us, shattered in the Garden, awaited a new fullness of time. When the acceptable time came, “when peaceful stillness encompassed everything and the night in its swift course was half spent, God’s all-powerful Word leapt from heaven’s royal throne into the doomed land” and the darkness of our hearts-Wisdom 18:15-17.

At the first Christmas, the whole world is in movement. Mary and Joseph travel to Bethlehem to be counted in the census. They journey, at the same time, toward the moment in which God, in the Person of Jesus, will enter the world through the womb of Mary, to live out His dream of a shared life of communion and intimacy with us. 

The Father knows the price He will pay for His dream. Mary, in Her mother’s heart and her knowledge of the Scriptures, knows it too. Her Son, Who shall be called the Messiah, the Christ, the Son of the Most High, will also be known as the Suffering Servant who will give his life up as a ransom for the many. 

God enters our world in the fullness of time because He can no longer wait to be with us in Person. But Christmas also comes because mankind, in the persons of Mary and Joseph, the shepherds and the wise men, seek God as well; because the intense, hidden longing of their souls has not been misinterpreted to them by the false prophets of the world. Their interior has not been cluttered with distraction. It is unfettered by illusion. God is their inner life and moves them in a mutual, eager longing, in silence, in poverty, in simplicity, in penetrating light and redeeming love so that His dream and our own everlasting happiness can be realized.
In every age, in the life of every person, this same movement is recapitulated. Christmas reminds us of this in a special way. For we too are moving on a journey through this life, in company with millions of others, to our own definitive encounter with God, a God Who has beckoned us to the deepest friendship and Who offers the gift of eternal joy to us by coming into the night of our world, our hearts, our souls, in the trappings of our own poverty, helplessness and littleness.

Mary and Joseph “walk the way of perfection” to Bethlehem because they know God and they understand, in the hidden depths of their hearts, the dream He has for all mankind. They call us to follow this way with them, a way which holds difficulty, discomfort, the contempt of the world, but which brings us also to be the friends of God, as the psalmist says: “He who walks the way of perfection shall be my friend.” -Ps 101

On Christmas night, Angel voices will beckon us to follow them to the stable where Eternal Love pierces through the veil of separation to reclaim His children, those starved for light and battered by the darkness of sin. As a tiny babe He comes. He comes to feed the hollow faces of the hopeless with joy, and surface the hidden grief that devours in silence, in order to heal in love.

In Bethlehem, two longings meet and answer each other: the longing of God and the longing of man. May this Christmas find us fulfilling the dream of God’s own heart in the lowly stable of our own souls. May He find in us the warmth and love and union that has been His dream from before time began.

Sr. AMW/SOLT

Dec. 6, 2018