'Striving to be 'CHRIST in the World'

My dear friends,

It is with great joy and hope that we celebrate the great mystery of the incarnation, the mystery of God’s own Son taking flesh and becoming one of us to live among us. We will never be able to completely plumb the depths of this incredible event and its meaning, yet across the ages it has inspired and changed the lives of billions of people.
It is both interesting and thought provoking that God would choose to meet and encounter us as a human being, and starting as we start, as a vulnerable, dependent baby. Yet it makes perfect sense; what better way to communicate divine realities than through the human journey and the bitter/sweet context within which that takes place.
At the heart of this celebration is the mystery of God’s love for all people. God, in Jesus, came to be close to us and share our human struggle, he came to show us what is important and not important, and best of all he came to share his life, God’s life. Jesus’ mystery of being is very much intertwined with our mystery of being and through this relationship we are able to understand our true dignity and purpose, appreciating our own giftedness and uniqueness. When we welcome Christ into our lives, we begin the process of embracing these things, and our true self gradually emerges.
The antithesis of the ‘true self’ is the ‘false self’, and we are a combination of both. The key thing is to try to live out of the true self and less out of the false self which is a place of ‘disconnection’ which is what the church calls ‘original sin’. Sins are simply symptoms of that disconnection; disconnection from our true selves, from each other and from God.
I suppose we could say that the incarnation is about reconnection. Through His humanity and how He lived his life, Jesus shows us the way to reconnection through our humanity, so the divine life can emerge from within us, as it did with Mary, to touch the world and bless it with God’s love; ‘God becomes human that we might become divine’. (St Athanasius)
I would like to wish you and your loved ones a happy Christmas and may the Christ-Child fill your hearts with awe and wonder in this Holy season.
God bless you all,

Fr Brett

'We plant the seeds that one day will grow.
We water seeds already planted,
knowing that they hold future promise.
We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces far beyond our capabilities.
We cannot do everything,
and there is a sense of liberation in realising that.
This enables us to do something, and to do it very well.
It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter and do the rest.
We may never see the end results,
but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker.
We are workers, not master builders;
ministers, not messiahs.
We are prophets of a future not our own.'

Oscar Romero