Is There Room For Them Now?

Red in many ways foreshadowed the Holy Father’s Christmas Eve homily. I often read the Christmas story with a tinge of anxiety…no room for Mary and Joseph! I think of the preparations we make to welcome a new baby and I am amazed at Mary’s abandonment and trust! But I am tempted to think that question only applied two thousand years ago.

But the Holy Father, in his ChristmasMidnight Mass homily, poses the same question to us here and now:

What would happen if Mary and Joseph were to knock at my door. Would there be room for them? …Do we really have room for God when he seeks to enter under our roof? Do we have time and space for him? Do we not actually turn away God himself? We begin to do so when we have no time for God. The faster we can move, the more efficient our time-saving appliances become, the less time we have. And God? The question of God never seems urgent. Our time is already completely full…

Let us go over to Bethlehem, says the Church’s liturgy to us today. Trans-eamus is what the Latin Bible says: let us go “across”, daring to step beyond, to make the “transition” by which we step outside our habits of thought and habits of life, across the purely material world into the real one, across to the God who in his turn has come across to us. Let us ask the Lord to grant that we may overcome our limits, our world, to help us to encounter him, especially at the moment when he places himself into our hands and into our heart in the Holy Eucharist.

The homily is beautiful and gives much to reflect on during these days of Christmas. You can read the whole text here.