While they were there, the time came for her to have her child, and she gave birth to her firstborn son. She wrapped Him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.
          Et Verbum caro factum est. And the Word became flesh. Et habitavit in nobis. And dwelt among us.
          This is what we celebrate this night, or better I should say, this morning. That the Eternal Son of God, the Word of God, took our humanity to Himself, through the self gift of a Virgin named Mary, betrothed to a man named Joseph, and entered into our human history at a particular time and place, in the town of Bethlehem in Judea, when Caesar Augustus was Emperor of Rome and Quirinius was Governor of Syria.
          She wrapped Him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn. Listen now to these ancient words once spoken about this holy night:

"O wondrous bondage and sojourn which He endured, who holds the world in His hand! From His first day He seeks only poverty, and honors it in His own Person. Had He wished, He might have appeared moving the heavens, shaking the earth, hurling down the lightnings. But not in this way did He come. He wished to save, not to cast down, and from the beginning to tread underfoot the foolish pride of man. So He not only became man, He became a poor man; and chose a poor mother, who had not even a cradle wherein her new born Babe might lie."

"He wished to save, not to cast down, and from the beginning to trample underfoot the foolish pride of man." And so he came to us as a little child, a helpless infant, completely dependent upon His Mother, Mary and her beloved Spouse, Joseph, for everything. This is how a more recent author, Father John W Lynch, explains the humble setting of that first Christmas night, in his prose poem, A Woman Wrapped in Silence:

"O, this is why His birthplace holds no more than emptiness, stripped bare and clean of all the proud pretension we might hang for feeble fringes, fraudulent with stale dishonors. We can grant no purer gift than she, and we are helpless to provide Him whiter tribute than is held in these pale hands that hovered over Him, and that which rose to meet Him from her eyes."

          And then he describes our Blessed Mother picking up her Child: "And then she knelt and held Him close against her heart, and in the midnight, adoration fused with human love, and was not separate."
          "Adoration fused with human love, and was not separate." This is what Christmas means for you and me who believe: that in the birth of His Son, Jesus, God has bridged the gap. God has closed the chasm between the adoration and worship that is due to God alone and the love that we share among ourselves as brothers and sisters. Not only were adoration and human love fused and not separate when our Blessed Mother held her Child in her arms, but the two are fused now and forever for us who have come to believe that Jesus is the Son of God, who now live our lives as members of His Body, because Jesus is our God made manifest. When we look upon Him with faith and with love, we have seen the Father. And the communion of love we share as members of God's family here and now is a participation in the very love of God, in the very life of God who is love.

"And very near, the man named Joseph came. He was not tired now, nor worn, nor sad. His step was gentle, and a lightness soared within him, till the memory of angel voices heard in dreams was now a less remembrance for him than the sight of hands that held a sleeping Child. He was the first to find her thus, the first of all the world. And when her faint smile called for him to take Him for a breathless moment, he was first to know there is no other blessedness."

          Do you see? Do you begin to understand? You and I are made for God. All of our human striving, all of our desires, the reason we get up in the morning, and do the things we do for the ones we love, is, in reality, so much striving after happiness, trying to achieve the end for which we are made. And you and I are made for God, to be happy with God forever. And what we celebrate at Christmas is that God has come to us; that God's desire to be with us is infinitely greater than our desire to be with Him could ever be. He has not hidden Himself from us in some remote heaven; He has not kept us at arm's length. No, He became one of us, so that you and I might live forever as one with Him. And you and I do not have to settle for some pale substitute, some stand-in, created, limited good that can never satisfy the infinite desire of the human heart. No, in the silence of this holy night, you and I are invited into the humble stable of Bethlehem, to let our human love fuse with adoration as we give praise and glory to our God asleep in His Mother's arms.

          Venite adoremus. O come let us adore Him.