The First Christmas Eve – Redemption is at hand!
Our Lord has completed the work of his first nine months. The time of his birth is at hand. How did he feel in that moment?
Our Lord has completed the work of his first nine months. The time of his birth is at hand. How did he feel in that moment?
Editor’s Notes
Happy Christmas Eve to all our readers!
In this part, Fr. Coleridge tells us…
How Christ's Heart gathered all creation's yearnings while discerning good amid universal degradation
That the Nine Months completed perfect worship and redemptive preparation in Mary's womb
Why each step toward Nativity fulfilled eternal counsel through tranquil obedience and intense prayer
He shows us that the Incarnate Word's hidden life already accomplished the work of honouring God perfectly and preparing all instruments of salvation before entering the world.
You can hear an abridged and adapted version of a chapter from Fr Coleridge on Our Lord’s life in Our Lady’s womb here, which featured as part of The WM Review’s series Preparing for Total Consecration to the Blessed Virgin According to the Method of St Louis de Montfort:
The Expectation of the Nativity
The Nine Months
Chapter XIV
St. Luke ii. 1-15; Story of the Gospels, § 8
Burns and Oates, London, 1885
Our Lord’s Heart
Mary bore within her womb One to Whom the full import of the event which was about to take place was more clear than even to herself.
The Heart of our Lord gathered up in His own affections all her yearnings and desires, the yearnings and desires of the whole human world, and of the universe itself. He could understand the perfection of which the Creation which His hand made was capable, what was designed for it in the eternal decrees of its Maker, how glorious was to be that renovation which was to have its source in Him. He could see in everything He had made, and which had been subjected to vanity, as the Apostle says, by the Fall, the want of that greater perfection, and the craving for that more true and abiding beauty.
All natures were open to Him, what they were, and what they might hereafter be, while the harmony and balance and mutual interdependence which bound them together in so marvellous an order, was to His eyes only the promise and foreshadowing of a nobler universe yet to come. He had made the human world His own by becoming Man, and in the human world He had already summed up the various orders of existence to which He had given the life which they possessed. All was to be renovated and elevated, and the principle of the renovation and elevation which were to come lay in His own Humanity.
Good and evil in man
Over that human world the eyes of the future Saviour fell with unutterable love. It was a wild and a tangled maze of degradation and misery, of ignorance where there should have been knowledge of God, of darkness where there should have been light, of foulness where there should have been purity, of cruelty and hatred where gentleness and charity should have reigned. To the Heart of the Saviour of mankind there was nothing, even in all that wilderness of abominations, which did not move the most intense and tender pity. He saw, in all the aberrations of men, the mischief which they generated rather than the guilt which they involved.
He read in their most lowering passions, in their most wanton and barbarous excesses, only their need of the redemption which He came to bring them. The louder the cry of sin and pride and hate rose before the throne of heaven, the more deeply did it pierce His Heart as an appeal for help and light and healing and mercy. The maddest ravings of insolence and blasphemy sounded to Him as the most piteous appeals for mercy and relief. On the Cross He was to say of His murderers, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do !” and now the whole world of sin and crime was crying out to Heaven for the enlightenment of its ignorances and the pardoning of its sins. He fastened, now as then, on every element in the misery of man which could be pleaded as man’s excuse.
Workings of the good spirit
In the most perverse will He could discern the instinct for good which was wasting itself on a false object. He took account of all the influences of corrupt tradition and evil examples, of the tyranny of the unregenerate world forcing men on to excesses the character of which they did not know. In the depths of moral degradation He read only the need of redemption. His eyes sounded all those depths, and they did not quail before the frightful glare of the Hell to which they led.
He would fain have quenched it for them entirely in His own Blood.
He could count over also all the struggling elements of good which were lost amid this sea of evil. His eye fastened on natural virtues, on half efforts to follow the law of conscience, on devotional impulses diverted to usurping objects, on every faint and secret homage ever paid to truth or virtue or honour, every sacrifice of self-love, every resistance to licence, every courageous persistence in right against the sneering world or the clamouring crowd.
All over the world He saw the evil in a clearness of deformity and a nakedness of malice which would have appalled any but the Saviour. And He saw also good where no one but Himself could have distinguished it from the over-lying mass of evil. He saw the evil only to compassionate it, He rejoiced in the faintest good that He might foster it and strengthen it.
He came now not to judge but to save, and He took into His Heart with infinite tenderness every single feature in the moral condition of mankind as it lay before Him, which called for healing, or which gave the faintest promise of a welcome to His efforts and devices for the accomplishment of the work of salvation.
Our Lord also knew perfectly all the workings of the good Spirit in the souls of men, from the simplest breathings of a desire for the rewards of virtue, and of a life led in obedience to the interior admonitions of conscience, to the most powerful workings of the Holy Ghost in all the divine love and fervour of the highest prayer.
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