The Word Made Flesh
Julián Carrón - Dante's phrase is well known to all: “Ciascun confusamente un bene apprende / nel qual si queti l’animo, e desira; / per che di giugner lui ciascun contende” (Dante - Purgatorio XVII, 127-129).
What each of us confusingly seeks is mystery. We are looking for something to quiet our souls, but because it is itself a mystery, we wander aimlessly. This is our daily experience.
This explains our rampant bewilderment and also makes the existential situation in which we find ourselves pathetic. As long as the object we seek remains obscure, each person can imagine what he wants and shape his relationship with that object as he pleases.
Think of the experience of love: a person desires to love and be loved, but as long as the face of the loved one is unknown, what does he do? He wanders around. It is only when that face appears that we can be magnetized by it with our whole selves. I know that what I seek exists because I am always longing for him, but each time I grasp a detail, I focus on it, and then it leaves me unsatisfied.
Nothing is enough: neither woman to man nor man to woman, neither mother to son nor son to mother, neither money nor power. This is man's destiny—unless what Wittgenstein hypothesizes happens: “This striving for the absolute, which makes any earthly happiness seem too petty ... seems to me stupendous, sublime, but I fix my gaze on earthly things: unless ‘God’ visits me.”
Only those who are truly aware of the dramatic situation of our existence can grasp the scope of the Mystery we celebrate today. “God, no one has ever seen him: the only-begotten Son, who is God and is in the bosom of the Father, it is he who has revealed him.” What we seek—that which is “mysterious”—can only be given to us through the Son.
That is why “God entered man's life as a man, according to a human form, so that thought and all his imaginativeness, affectivity and all his dreaming could be ‘blocked,’ magnetized by that carnal presence!” (L. Giussani, È, se opera, pp. 68-70).
This is what the Gospel we have just heard proclaims today: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us; and we beheld his glory, glory as of the only-begotten Son who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.” So now, after this event, we have the opportunity to let ourselves be magnetized and bound together, because the Word made flesh shines with glory “full of grace and truth.”
And when we meet him, we can understand what Calderón de la Barca says: “Your voice was able to soften me, Your presence to hold me, and Your respect to move me. Who art Thou? You, only You, have aroused the admiration of my eyes, the wonder of my hearing. Every time I look at You, You cause me new amazement, and the more I look at You, the more I desire to look at You.” This is the attraction that magnetizes us, for “In Him was life, and the life was the light of men; the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”
This is our chance to overcome our wandering: to be “attracted,” “taken.” And this is the life we seek and can only receive as a gift. Christmas is the splendor of this gift that was in the bosom of the Father and was revealed: “this eternal [which was in the bosom of the Father] today becomes present in temporal reality.” Not only on Christmas Day, but every day in history, because he came to remain with us always—to continue shining—so that we can be magnetized anew.
This fact cannot become something of the past otherwise we would return to wandering. “The Lord who always comes is always coming again; He never departs to come again” (Balthasar). It will always be one flesh that draws us anew. This is what a girl remarks upon seeing a colleague’s face shining as she arrives at work: “She should come in here every day! Yes, her—always her—because she has this smile and joy shining on her face!” If it were not so, “what would it profit you that Christ once came in the flesh, if He does not come into your flesh today?” (Origen, In Lk. hom 22:3).
Christmas of the Lord - Year C
Notes from the homily of Julián Carrón - Dec. 25, 2024
(First Reading: Is 52:7-10; Psalm 97 (98); Second Reading: Heb 1:1-6; Gospel: Jn 1:1-18)
