Elizabeth Anne Seton has the distinction of being the first native-born citizen of the USA to have been canonised. Mother Seton, as she was usually called, did heroic work bringing education to the poorest of the poor at the beginning of the 19th century but she was not born a Catholic. Her family background was Episcopalian, what we would now term Anglican, and it was only when she went to Italy to try to prolong the life of her ailing husband that she was immersed in a different culture. The story is told of how Mother Seton was taken to Mass one Sunday – it was all very strange to her and she felt quite lost. Behind her were two of her countrywoman who spent the whole time making disparaging remarks – when it came to the words of consecration and the priest lifted up the Host, one the American woman said in a loud stage whisper: “they think that this is God”. For St Elizabeth Seton this was her moment of conversion, every bit as sudden as for St Paul outside Damascus. In a flash of insight, she knew that Christ was immediately present to her in the Eucharist, a reality she never doubted from then on, and a truth which was to underpin her love of God and neighbour ever after.
“They think that this is God”. In our own times, it seems that there is a new aggression in society against the claims of faith. On the one hand, political correctness seems to go to any lengths to undermine religious distinctiveness, while an intellectually vacuous relativism promotes any idea as having the same worth as any other – and the likes of the Pullmans and the Hitchins and the Dawkins of this world never miss an opportunity to push their God-less agenda. The balance in the public domain is pushing heavily against the claims of religion in general and Christianity in particular. Like T S Eliot’s Magi, believers, too, have “a cold coming of it”.
But we have are here together at this midnight hour to attest our belief “that this is God”. Christian faith centres on the identity of the One lying in the manger. He is, for us, the human face of the eternal God: the tangible expression, at a particular place and at an identifiable time, of the most profound mystery of all – love incarnate, the total and complete self-revelation of the Divine. An early Christian writer (St Hippolytus) expresses the significance of Mary’s Child in this way: “The Word was God and was invisible to the created world, but God made him visible. He spoke, as he had done before, and begetting light from light, he sent forth his own mind to the world as its Lord. The Word is the mind of God: he came into the world and was shown forth as Son of God”.
St Paul in writing to the Christians at Corinth claims that “we are those who have the mind of Christ” and then in the Letter to the Philippians he can pray: “have in you that mind that is in Christ Jesus”. We really do believe that Christ is God’s definitive Word spoken for all time to the creation he loves, and that each human being, created in the image and likeness of the Creator, can have their own share in the mind of Christ: in other words, God can be known and experienced within the human heart and soul. But does this kind of theorising make any difference, or is it just a kind of play on language?
Whenever I have the privilege of baptising a child, I say the same thing to its parents and Godparents – bring up this child to be afraid of nothing. I am not being naïve in saying that because I know the state of this world as well as they do. But, as Scripture says, “perfect love casts out fear”, and our belief, our conviction, is that, once God has entered our world in the form of the Babe of Bethlehem, we have proof positive that the strongest force in this world - despite every sign to the contrary - is love, love so amazing, so divine. Ultimately, everything that is not loving, that is negative & life denying, & sad and just plain bad, will be consumed in the fire of that love which beats in the heart of the Godhead.
“They think that this is God”. As for Mother Seton, so for us. It is here in the context of the Eucharist that theory and practice come together, that God is earthed, rooted in the things of this life, that He becomes knowable, touchable, real to those with the eyes to see, the hearts open to love. I do not know what the New Year will bring. Probably like 2009 it bring its share of pain – the economy will continue to threaten the stability of so many families, Afghanistan will continue to claim its toll of young lives – but what Christmas tells me is that it will not always be so – that, beginning from that stable in a Palestinian backwater 2,000 years ago, the world is being renewed, that love alone endures, that love ultimately, will have its vindication. The Christ Child holds out his arms to you, and to me. Will we accept him for what he is – the mind of God - love incarnate? If we will, then we shall share in that peace which passes all understanding, which defies human logic – and that peace is my Christmas prayer for you.
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