Nativity of Christ

The Nativity feast is buried under layers of commercial Christmas, family sentiment, and cultural nostalgia that have accumulated over centuries. The challenge for the contemplative practitioner is not to dismiss all of this but to find, beneath it or through it, what the feast is actually saying.

What it is saying is astonishing: the eternal, uncreated God — the One before whom existence itself is contingent — entered the world as a helpless infant in a cave used for sheltering animals, to a peasant woman in an obscure Roman province, announced to shepherds at the bottom of the social order rather than to emperors at the top. The One who sustains the cosmos in being took on the condition of total dependence.

The Eastern tradition calls this the Incarnation. It is the ground of everything else.

What the Incarnation Makes Possible

The doctrine of theosis — deification, human beings becoming participants in divine life — is only coherent because of the Incarnation. If God had not truly taken on human nature, the claim that human nature can be genuinely transfigured by divine life would be a pious metaphor. Because God genuinely became human, human nature is capable of bearing the divine. The path is opened.

Maximos the Confessor worked out the implications more carefully than anyone. For Maximos, the Nativity is the beginning of the cosmic restoration: the eternal Logos, in whom all the logoi of creation are contained, takes on the flesh of creation, uniting in himself the uncreated and the created. The Incarnation is the beginning of the end of the alienation that the Fall inaugurated.

"God became human so that human beings might become God." Athanasius wrote this in the fourth century. He meant it completely seriously. Not that humans become omnipotent or replace God — but that human nature, because it has been genuinely united with divinity in Christ, is now capable of genuine participation in divine life. Not by ceasing to be what we are, but by becoming, at last, fully what we were made to be.

The Kenotic Mystery

If the Resurrection reveals what the end of the story is, the Nativity reveals the manner of the journey: through kenosis, through self-emptying, through the voluntary assumption of limitation.

The eternal light entered time in the form of extreme vulnerability. A cave. A night. A flight into Egypt. Years of hidden life in an obscure village. The tradition is not promising you a path of glory. It is promising you a path that follows the shape of the one who walked it first.

The Nativity fast — forty days of preparation, beginning November 15 — is the body's preparation for this encounter. The feast itself, when it arrives, is the celebration of the door that has been opened.