It is a terrible thing, that no one of us should realize what it means that there has been a Christmas in our world.

Yet some of us will, perhaps, say: "We know what it is all about. Christ is born."

"So Christ is born! And what does that mean?"

"It means we are redeemed; it means we are saved."

"Is that all?"

"Christ is born! We are going to go to heavenl" And I say to you, it is a terrible thing that none of us should be able to realize what it means, that there has been a Christmas in our world.

Is this something that happens in every man's childhood? It happened in mine. Yours too, I suppose. One day (which was almost certainly not Christmas) without any apparent reason or occasion, you suddenly became conscious of who you were. Your identity came out like an image on a negative, and it was real with a new and unfamiliar kind of reality that was realer than anything you knew.

It was something you felt to be too important to tell anybody, so important that it was impossible to explain....

You had discovered that you were a person. You knew who you were.

There was once conceived a Man to Whom this happened at the first second when He came into existence.

A human Soul, a will capable of unimaginably great love and a mind wide enough to take in infinity: a soul, mind and will, which had, a moment before, been nothing, had not existed, came into being because in the heart of a girl an almost unspoken assent was given to a movement of great grace.

And in the fraction of a second in which this Soul, in its Flesh, began to exist, the Man Who was so conceived was at once awake and saw, not vaguely, not in mystery, not with surmise or question, but saw clearly, and fully, and without being dazzled or frightened—saw Who He was.

He saw Who He was, because when He awoke out of nothingness He was gazing, with His whole Intellect into the Face of the Infinite Truth Who was at the same time His Father and Himself.

This Man, Who had never before existed, and had just begun to exist, saw, realized, fully grasped the meaning not of the words "I exist, I am myself," but:

"I am God!"

That does not shake you? You can consider that proposition, and you are still conscious ? That a Man should come into existence and at once fully comprehend, without a shadow of the slightest fear of any uncertitude, that He is God—this does not surprise you?

Perhaps you are thinking: It was not a surprise to Him, not even a discovery. He had known that forever. He was the Word.

You have not quite grasped the statement.

It was a Man that knew this thing, a Man's mind, a human intellect, a human soul, a soul that had not existed until that moment, a soul as created and as independent as your soul or mine, as human as yours or mine, with all the autonomous consciousness of an individual man who knows and loves and knows that he knows and loves, and is aware of himself as distinct from every other man.

It was not the Person of the Word that experienced what I have just said, but the human soul of Christ. And the Person of the Word has no intellect of His own as Word: His Divine Intellect is One with that of the Father and the Holy Ghost.

It was not the Word realizing that He was the Word but Christ's human soul realizing in the light of His own Divinity:

"I, an individual Man, distinct from all the other men who have been born and ever shall be born, I am God!"

And yet that proposition does not begin to tell us anything about what the soul of Christ saw and realized when He came into being and knew His own identity.

There is a tremendous silence peculiar to victory.

It belongs to nothing else: only to victory.

It is so profound that it comprehends, absorbs, penetrates everything. The battle is all over. The horrible tornado of noise is all over. The killing has all stopped. Silence. Everything relaxes.

The quiet sinks into your muscles, seeps right through you, and slowly, sweetly, mightily illuminates, enriches the mind and pacifies the will, and embraces all the being that is yourself with a splendid calm....

Take the Book of Psalms and read the second one in the book.

"Why have the gentiles raged, and the people devised vain things?

"The kings of the earth stood up and the princes met together against the Lord and against is Christ. Let us break their bonds asunder: and let us cast away their yoke from us. He that dwelleth in heaven shall laugh at them: and the Lord shall deride them. Then shall He speak to them in His anger and trouble them in His rage...."

Victory. Silence.

And out of the unfathomable deeps of the light of the heart of that silence the calm voice of everlasting Certitude:

"The Lord hath said to Me: Thou Art My Son, This day have I begotten Thee . . ."

You know well enough what it is to love your friends. Their joy becomes your joy because you are anointed with gladness at the mere thought of the things that have enriched your friend's soul. To think how happy your friends are (when they are happy) is enough to make you happy all long.

It is enough to love Christ, and to realize what was in the soul of Christ from the first moment that He began to be Christ—this, I say, is enough to make you happy forever. Only realize, and remember it. You will never know sorrow.

In a sense, that will be the best thing in heaven: realizing the glory of Christ's recognition of Who He Is. And that is a safe statement, because in this mystery most of all will we come somewhere near understanding the fulness of the infinite depths of the nature and essence of God Who is Love.

But we have not yet really said what that realization was.

We have put what Christ saw into the words "I am God." Translated, that means "I am everything." But that is not enough, and it is so inadequate that it gives a completely false idea.

Here is the true idea, and the one which alone really opens to us the way to enter into Christ's Joy.

What He realized, on realizing Who He was, was not merely: "I am everything," but "I have received everything." Omnia mihi tradita sunt. "All things are delivered to Me and no one knoweth the Son but the Father: neither doth anyone know the Father but the Son, and he to whom it shall please the Son to reveal Him."

This is the thing Christ saw in that first moment of profound silence and which He contemplated in the solitude of His infinitely deep love all His days on earth, and which He contemplates in heaven, and in our tabernacles, at this hour.

From the soundless depths of the infinite Godhead into the depths and roots of His human soul and human being came not only creation and sustenance and assistance and all given power but His human being existed and subsisted in a Divine Person, so that His being was the Being of God and His acts were attributed to the Word of God, His love was God's love and His vision was God's vision, and all this was His by the gift and the eternal decree of the inconceivable, immense Love Who is God.

We who are little and weak, we who are straw men, we cannot think of the greatest experiences of life without seeing everything through the cloud of a fervid excitement. Love is too much for us. God is too much for us. His glory is apt to carry us away, sweep us out of ourselves. We lose all understanding in agitation and feeling and excitement.

With Christ it was not so.

You want to understand what is glory? The glory of God?

His soul embodied the philosopher's definition: clara cognitio cum laude—clear knowledge full of praise. For Christ's soul, from that first moment, was all clarity, all peace, all magnificent and luminous silence and all praise and in the first glance of His Man's life, He did not fear to look straight, or to open to God His Heart's Love and receive the Love of God in one draught, in one tremendous breathI

And in that instant He saw—as He afterwards taught Duns Scotus to see, the He, Christ, this Man, this perfect Soul, this Sacred Heart, he was the reason why the world and the universe and all the living things and the men and the angels and all mighty spirits had been created. He was their Head, the Head of men and angels. He was their life, their salvation, their very.reason for existence.

He saw that God, Who from all eternity loved Himself for the sake of His own perfect Love, wanted to share His Love with someone outside Himself, other than Himself. He willed to see His own Joy exulting in a will, an intellect other than His own and as perfectly as in His own. And instead of choosing an angelic spirit to receive this gift of Himself, He had chosen the humblest of the rational natures and united it to Himself in unity of Person, in order that His own magnificent Love might he the more exultant and exalted!

And the Christ Who came into being at that fraction of a second and realized Who He was and what was His immense dignity: He it was Who came into existence and looked, without fear or excitement, full into the face of the truth: "I am that Man. I am the Christ. I am God."

We who are men and are born into a world full of wars and sufferings which are the fruit of our own sins, we naturally look at the Incarnation first of all from our point of view. Before everything else we see that the Child Christ is born to us as a Savior and a Redeemer. We lift up our heads in the middle of our grief and look upon a Messiah Who has come to deliver us from ourselves and give us peace, peace in our hearts and joy.

But the Christ Who is born to us is not thinking most of all of our sins or of His Cross. These only enter into His vision in an incidental way, per accidens.

Realizing Who He is, contemplating the terrific Love that has given Him a Divine Existence, He instantly does the one thing that He was brought into the world to do: He answers the gift of God to Himself by the entire offering of Himself to God.

He would have done the same thing if there had never been a sin in the world. He was born for one thing only: to give God perfect glory by His love, and to bring all rational and spiritual beings into participation of His own Love of God. And thus the whole universe would give God glory in Christ.

At the first moment of His Incarnation, in the clarity of that silence and intelligence, the soul of Christ blazed with the flame of God's glory, the radiance of eternity, His own Love, praise, and adoration of God.

He looked into the depths of the Trinity, of which His own Person was, so to speak, the center, and his Sacred Heart, Man's Heart, Human Will, Man's Soul, shone like the sun and overflowed with the fire of an adoration intense, perfect, calm and supreme. It was the adequate, total, integral adoration which alone could give God the glory that really belongs to Him. The flame of that act bursts forth from the depths of the Divine Being of the Man Christ and speaks God's praise into the very essence of God without tremor and without dismay.

"Ecce venio... Behold I come to do Thy will, O Lord!"...

That act has never ceased. It goes on forever. We have often seen it without understanding, as it is repeated over and over before our eyes on our Altars. That act of Love, of Infinite Adoration would have been the center and source of all spiritual life in time and in eternity, even if Adam had never sinned and there had been no captives to redeem ...

But since there was sin in the world, without an added effort, almost without an added expense of thought or consideration, that perfect flame also embraced a cross and consumed all sin. The God that had come to live among us as Man would also live among us as Redeemer and here is the difference. There was one thing that made the flame of His love burn, if possible, with a more tremendous intensity: it was the joy that He could even sacrifice and seem to destroy Himself for the glory of His Father!

You are looking for the meaning of Christmas? You cannot help seeing it, first of all, from the point of view of our own human misery. But if you want to celebrate Christmas, enter into the celebration which is in the soul of the Man-God, Christ!

Where will you find that celebration? Not in noise, but in silence. Not in restlessness, but in peace. Not in selfishness, but in selflessness. Not in your own misery, but in the greatness and goodness of God. Not outside your own soul, but within your own soul, and as deep within it as the point where the spirit, in the invisible, suprasensible clarity of grace and faith, makes vital contact with the Word Who is Christ.

Enter into His peace, His silence, that you may taste His glory, and realize something of what it means that there has been a Christmas in our dark world: and realize that there is a feast which is celebrated at the very roots of all existence!