How the Baby Protects Us

There is nothing like truth to extinguish pride: Here is the way things really are. Here is the way I really am. This is what really matters, and that is what doesn’t. This is the real source of my life and strength, and that is really not.

There is nothing like truth to ground faith and foster hope: Here is the way things really are. Here is what I can be, and shall be. This is who controls things, and that is who and what really doesn’t. This is the real source of my confidence and aspiration, and that is really not.

There is nothing like truth to awaken and magnify love: Here is the way things really are. This is who loves me and will always love me. This is who really matters, and that is what doesn’t. This is the real source of  joy and peace, and that really isn’t.

The Baby is the Truth. Look at him. See what he is, and what he means. Behold the Statement, the Message, the Word: Here is the way things really are.

Thus may resentment give way to gratitude, envy to prayer, irritability to solicitude, selfishness to care, ambition to enthusiasm, self-pity to patience, anxiety to trust, distraction to purity, confusion to vocation, and loneliness to love.

As Walter Hilton reminds us, in the Bible the truth is a shield, a shield against pride, and doubt, and worry, and all manner of temptation to feel and think and speak and act as if the world were other than it truly is. The Baby protects us from all that as we tear our eyes away from what frightens or seduces us to stare at the Truth of our Universe, to read the Love Letter from God enveloped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.

“Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us.” Let us go now, and on Christmas Eve, and on Christmas Day, and on every day, world without end. Amen.