It is late on Christmas eve… As each minute passes, the feast of Heaven and Earth draws closer, the feast that announces that God is with us.

What words or images could I possibly offer to express what this means – when I myself do not understand? Yet something in me longs to proclaim it. The beauty, the truth of it.

The Word was made flesh to live among us, to reveal the face of a loving Father always with us, intimately present in every moment of my life and yours.

Yet I hardly seem able to remember this for more than a few minutes at a time, if at all.

I am like one afflicted, so preoccupied by my disease that I forget the medicine I have been given. Or like one starving, too weak from hunger to remember to eat my food.

But He is here. He has come to be the medicine that heals me, the food that nourishes me back to life.

He has come to look for me when I am too lost, too weak, too preoccupied to look for Him. He wraps me in love, like an infant in the arms of its mother, until I am strong enough to walk along side of Him.

Having taken on flesh Himself, He has humbled Himself so as to feel my fears, to endure the humiliations and pains I experience because of sin. He is with me and He is with you, at each step and around every unexpected corner.

Through each step, in every sorrow and triumph, He gives me His heart to live in my heart. I begin to see. And believe. And know. His heart becomes my heart and my life becomes love.

And then I forget. I become like one afflicted, one starving…

And He comes looking for me again. No, I cannot say that. For He never left my side for a moment.

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Emmanuel.

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God is with us.

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Alleluia.