Thy Nativity, O Christ our God, hath shined the light of knowledge upon the world; for thereby they that worshipped the stars were instructed by a star to worship Thee, the Sun of Righteousness, and to know Thee, the Dayspring from on high. O Lord, glory be to Thee.
We are here, joyously keeping Christmastide, as a result of the “thereby.” God loved us, something nobody could demand, thereby, we have a certain hope. God became human, really human, something no philosopher could imagine, thereby, we have faith in history’s direction. God gave us light, thereby we who were blind, now can see. God granted us knowledge, thereby all our loves can lead to wisdom. God loved the entire world, thereby no truth, no good, and no beauty will be lost.
All is redeemed in Christmas.
We act and yet our actions are constrained by possibility. We can consent and even desire a good thing, but if the possibility is not, then our willing is mere fantasy. No person can live by fantasy: hoping for the impossible is madness. Given a good God, we can hope, look to the improbable, and when God’s will is revealed that hope can become faith. God makes a way, a possibility, thereby we can act.
God’s general will can be known in the law like regularity that He sustains in our cosmos. The beauty and harmony of creation are seen in this orderly pattern. God does not govern by whimsy, but by law, thereby science is possible. We can assume entities should not be multiplied and look for elegance in our theories.The paradigms that form the natural world are beautiful, thereby when we look we see wonder and glory. The wonder makes us think even more, spurring greater knowledge.
The glory is so pervasive, thereby the arts spring forth everywhere. God created all humankind in His Image, thereby the poet can have a muse from any person on Earth. The cosmos is illuminated, thereby nature herself can motivate beauty. We have to work at ugliness, twisting and breaking the goodness and beauty of the cosmos. God gives us the sea, we fill it with plastic.
In the mother of God, our Lady Theotokos, of Bethlehem we see an image of consent and harmony with the will of God. Mary said “yes” to God, but make no mistake: the glory she achieved is only possible in God. Best of all humanity, she is as the moon, reflecting the Divine Light and making the night good.
That all deeds are to the glory of God magnifies our accomplishments by putting them in the context of reality! There can be only one God logically.
As creatures, small beings in a big cosmos, we have limited agency. God presents us with a field of action. He need not have done so. We might have been without choice, longing to create, learn, study, but being given no scope for our imaginations. Instead, God gave us bountiful space within the cosmos and our minds, thereby we are allowed to make film, discover natural laws, and gain insight into the work of other Image bearing humans. This is glorious and God need not have done so, but did. As a result, we can imitate God, as Our Lady did gloriously, and bring forth an Emmanuel, a God with us, to our neighbors, thereby multiplying the joys of Christmas.
Christ is born!
Glorify Him!
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