Christmas Chaos
Dear All Saints Parish Family,
Are you experiencing any form of Christmas Chaos? Things like family plans not coming together as you’d like, a sense of unpreparedness, loneliness, frustration that the year hasn’t gone like you thought it would, or even disappointment that your high hopes for Advent being more fruitful or meaningful weren’t met? Or maybe there’s just so much to do you haven’t even been able to stop for a second to process.
Perhaps your heart needs, as mine certainly does, a gentle reminder that Our Lord Jesus Christ is no stranger to chaos…in fact, He is drawn to it.
It can be greatly spiritually fruitful to, even for a brief moment, recall that INCARNATE SON OF GOD, the King of Kings, the LORD of Lords, the Word Made Flesh, was born into a family, that by worldly standards, was completely unprepared for the task of birthing and raising the Son of God.
Consider the circumstances of His birth. Shouldn’t the King of Kings be born in a palace with attendants taking care of His and His Mother’s every need? Shouldn’t the Messiah be laid in a sacred and ornate crib, worthy of His great dignity? Yet He was born in a shack barely suitable for animals, surrounded by livestock instead of midwives and family. His crib was where the beasts ate. And the whole reason He was born there was because His extended family on Joseph’s side wanted nothing to do with a man who was wed to a woman seemingly pregnant with another man’s child…that’s right…St. Joseph took Our Lady to Bethlehem because each family had to go to their native towns to be counted for a census…and St. Joseph’s own family couldn’t make room for him and his pregnant spouse.
Talk about chaos! But the Lord chose to enter the world under such circumstances…to give dignity to and to raise up the human condition from its lowest places.
During our Women’s Guild Advent by Candlelight, our speaker Mrs. Abby Bettencourt gave a profoundly simple invitation to all present, to ask the Lord to make our hearts a little Bethlehem. The Lord was not ashamed or embarrassed to be born into the chaos of the original Bethlehem, and neither does He approach the interior Bethlehem feeling so.
And often the Lord can use the chaos of our lives for His purposes…just like how Our Lord was laid in that eating trough, it prefigures the great mystery of the Eucharist; “My flesh is true food and my blood is true drink.” Even Bethlehem means House of Bread, and that’s where the True Bread that Comes Down From Heaven began His earthly life.
That’s the mystery of Divine Providence. Nothing is outside God’s love. If we stop and try to offer the Lord our Christmas chaos, we’ll likely find Him already in it, bringing the peace that the world cannot give.
From all the clergy, staff, and ministry heads here at All Saints, I pray you and your family experience deeply the graces of this sacred Christmas season. May the Lord prove His closeness, especially in the midst of whatever seems most absent of His Presence.
Praised be Jesus Christ, the Newborn King, now and forever!
Holy Mary and St. Joseph, pray for us!
All you holy saints of God, pray for us!
Merry Christmas,
Fr. Michael Silloway
Pastor