Eastern Christian Insights

Thanks be to God, Our Lord’s Nativity is not a momentary escape from reality, but an invitation to enter into reality itself and find the healing of our humanity in Him.

Thanks be to God, Our Lord’s Nativity is not a momentary escape from reality, but an invitation to enter into reality itself and find the healing of our humanity in Him.

In the remaining days before Christmas, let us embrace the radically disorienting calling to hope in nothing and no one other than the God-Man Who is born to heal and fulfill all who bear the divine image and likeness.

Our fundamental vocation remains the same: to undergo a change of mind such that we offer ourselves without reservation in obedience to God. As with the Theotokos, Joseph the Betrothed, and James, there is no telling what that will mean for the course of our lives, but saying “yes” in free obedience as we take the steps we have the strength to take today remains the only way to participate personally in the healing of the human person made possible by the birth of Jesus Christ. Let us look to those we commemorate today as brilliant examples of how to do precisely that.

Thanks be to God, Our Lord’s Nativity is not a momentary escape from reality, but an invitation to enter into reality itself and find the healing of our humanity in Him.

In the remaining days before Christmas, let us embrace the radically disorienting calling to hope in nothing and no one other than the God-Man Who is born to heal and fulfill all who bear the divine image and likeness.

As “the poor and maimed and blind and lame,” we must prepare to accept the extraordinary invitation that is ours in Jesus Christ by gaining the strength to make our daily responsibilities points of entrance to the heavenly kingdom. They are not reasons to shut ourselves out of the heavenly banquet, but opportunities to unite ourselves ever more fully to Him in freedom.

As we pray, fast, give to the needy, and confess and repent of our sins this Advent, let us do so with the joyful hope of the woman who could finally stand up straight after eighteen years. For the Savior is born to deliver us from bondage in all its forms.

As we pray, fast, give to the needy, and confess and repent of our sins this Advent, let us do so with the joyful hope of the woman who could finally stand up straight after eighteen years. For the Savior is born to deliver us from bondage in all its forms.

Unlike the rich man, we must not walk away in sadness when our weakness before our passions becomes apparent, especially when we realize how far short we have fallen of the holiness to which Christ calls us.