The Birth of God Is Our Future
The Feast of Christmas holds a mystical quality – it stands as a Kairos moment, a divine interruption in our hurried world. In this sacred pause, we’re called to still ourselves and listen deeply to the whispers of the human heart.
My recent visit to a Berber village in Morocco brought the Nativity scene into vivid focus. Sitting within a Berber tent, I imagined the holy family on that cold night: Jesus born in similar humble surroundings, the brilliant star piercing the darkness, three wise men approaching on their stately camels from eastern lands. The scene unfolds with profound simplicity – a manger cushioned with hay, Mary in her youth, Joseph in his wisdom, shepherds from nearby fields, and gentle beasts gathering under the vast night sky. All of creation illuminated by the silent Word of God manifesting in our midst.
Christmas resembles the Big Bang of divine Love – an unstoppable force of energy expanding through space and time. God emerges as the unfathomable mystery of love, beyond love itself—the love beyond love. God is love’s flame, love’s weaver, the love beyond all loving. When love seems absent, God springs forth anew. Christmas marks this divine love’s emergence in our shadowed world. Every conflict, act of violence, and instance of human suffering speaks to an unborn God yearning to be loved, for love finds its completion only when received and returned in love.
Do we truly embrace this divine love’s transformative power? Our hearts yearn for belief, for love’s alchemical touch. Christmas offers a moment to lower our defensive walls. Children do this naturally, with joy, while adults often construct protective layers, guarding their convictions and viewpoints. The root of human struggle lies in our divided hearts and competing affections. As we cocoon ourselves within the ego’s thick shelter, we lose sight of life’s boundless possibilities.
Christmas beckons us to unveil our hearts, to embrace renewal. We’re invited to set aside our rational frameworks and experience our full humanity: the gentle touch, the warming smile, the heartfelt embrace, compassion’s tender care. We’re called to sense Earth’s yearning for love – the trembling trees, thirsty grasslands, birds seeking sanctuary in their nested communities. All creation voices its need for love.
This Christmas season invites us to move beyond logical analysis to heart-centered wisdom, reclaiming the soul as love’s vital center. Ideas prove transient, but love draws forth new life. We serve as midwives to the future, to an unfolding world. God represents the future’s potential, life’s infinite capacity for growth. Everything needed to create a world of justice, peace, dignity, shared abundance, and planetary harmony already exists within us. The cosmos of tomorrow lies in our hands. God is life itself. Christmas reminds us that God has come so we might experience life in its fullness.
The ritual of Christmas gift exchange carries deeper meaning – it teaches us to receive openly, express gratitude, and extend generosity to others. Across every culture, language, and corner of our world, the universal human longing remains constant: to give and receive love. In places where love seems absent, the act of offering love creates the very thing it seeks, revealing love as the fundamental truth of our existence.
To fully embrace love requires radical surrender – loosening our grip on control and allowing love to flow without restriction or condition. This surrender represents love’s narrow gateway, one that demands we accept vulnerability, bear suffering, and die to the isolated self. Though this path may feel desolate and lifeless at times, staying faithful to love ultimately leads us to profound freedom. As Jesus proclaimed: “If you make my Word your home, you will learn the truth, and the truth will set you free” (Jn 8:31-2). How do we learn the truth in a world of deception? By learning to love ourselves as we are, rather than striving to be what we are not. God loves as we are, not for what we are. In this truth is our freedom, and in freedom is our capacity to be born anew.
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Thank you for the loving-kindness you gave us in this reflection…May your days be blessed with hope in this jubilee year 🙏 Charlie
Thank you Ilia, for such an inspiring and poetic reflection. Your idea of an unborn God yearning to be loved in the cry of all creation is very beautiful. May we have the grace to honour it’s voice as children do, and trust in the love beyond love…This reminded me of Derek Walcott’s poem Love After Love and how we must learn to love again the stranger who was your self…The challenge, perhaps, is to choose to nest like birds in the warmth of God’s Word instead of cocooning ourselves in the thick (but ultimately deceptive) shelter of the ego…
Thanks again for such nourishing words on the Feast of St. John
So grateful to read this profound wisdom reflection this morning. Staying faithful to love no matter desolation in our life or the world!
“The feast of Christmas… a divine interruption in our hurried world”. Beautifully insightful.
Reminder of a special ‘moment’ in the enduring process of the Divine in and into creation. It is not so much the culmination of the “Oh come Emmanuel”, but rather the beginning of the “Emmanuel” unrelenting invitation to us to “come along”.
Love “every conflict, act of violence, and instance of human suffering speaks to an unborn God yearning to be loved for love finds it’s completion only when received and returned in love.”
Makes me think maybe the title to this article could be: The BIRTHING of God is our Future.
I am grateful that you articulate and share Love’s meaning and purpose. That not only resonates as truth in my heart, but provides hope in a time of pessimism and brokenness. Thank you!
Thank you Lila.This a Beautiful Teaching Thank you for sharing The profound Love of Jesus our Lord .
thank you. loving ourselves just as we are..and truly believing that’s good enough is the real challenge.v thanks for helping…
In Lectio this morning, I contemplated John 15:25, ” and you also will testify, because you have been with me from the beginning”. I have surrendered and been saved only to get lost again, to learn to surrender again and to be saved (or perhaps) rescued by Christ. I am at a point of complete surrender again, I give my life and everything that means, and pray that my future will testify. We were with him “from the beginning”…our mutual love has existed eternally. Our love will testify only when we can “lower our defensive walls” protecting our ego and welcome in the “cosmos of tomorrow”. It is within us and has been with him since the beginning.
Thank you Ilea. I love your writing and thinking.
Ilia,
Thank you for such a profound and meaningful reflection.