By GEORGE A. KENDALL
When God acts, all three Persons of the Trinity participate in the action, so clearly, all three, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, took part in the Incarnation of the Word of God, the event central to Christmas. Here, I would like to reflect on the work of the Holy Spirit in making the Christmas story possible.
“Chaire, kecharitomene.” These two words are, in St. Luke’s Greek, the Angel Gabriel’s greeting to Mary. The Latin translation of kecharitomene as gratia plena is usually rendered into English as “full of grace,” but the literal translation from the Greek is “graced one,” or “gifted one.” Both, I’m sure, represent aspects of the angel’s meaning.
But I find that, as I get older, I am more and more drawn to the Greek. This has to do with the fact that the universal order of the creation, and the ordered relationship of Creator and creature, which is its ground has become more and more vividly real to me. It is real to me, not just as an abstraction or, still worse, as an intellectual construction or system, but as a sense of personal participation in that order, a sense of being nourished by it, a sense of being bathed in its light and its truth.
The experience itself is simple — it is one thing, but if we try to talk about it or write about it, it requires a multiplicity of words that still can’t do justice to its simplicity, its unity. It is experienced as a gift, as joy, as peace. It is also momentary, passing almost as soon as it arrives, yet it contains the promise of an eternity that does not pass.
To be gifted in this way is to receive the Holy Spirit, to be bathed in light and love, to be graced. And, indeed, the angel tells Mary that the Holy Spirit will come upon her and the power of the Most High will overshadow her, and out of that gift of light and love will come Jesus, the Most High, the Savior and Redeemer of the new humanity.
Mary alone was privileged to receive the Holy Spirit in this way, and yet all Christians (and many, perhaps, who are not outwardly Christians but strive to live in God’s grace) do receive the Holy Spirit. When we receive Him into our lives we make it possible for Christ to dwell in our souls. Ultimately, the gift of the Holy Spirit in Christ is received by Mary and by us, though in very different ways. Meister Eckhart, the medieval mystic, calls this the birth of Christ in the soul.
With the angel’s announcement to the shepherds, we see a like pattern. The shepherds too, in the midst of the darkness of the night, suddenly find themselves bathed in the light and the love of the Holy Spirit. Suddenly, the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness cannot overcome it. And, also suddenly, there is the host of angels singing, “Glory to God in the highest, and peace on earth to men of good will,” the phrase which became the opening of the Gloria, the most beautiful prayer, I think, in all our Catholic liturgy. I can never hear it, or sing it, without being thrilled.
We can think of the appearance of the angels to the shepherds as the descent of the Spirit upon the Church, in which the shepherds prefigured the apostles, the hierarchy of the Church, which acts in persona Christi.
The Gospels themselves testify to the active presence of the Holy Spirit throughout the events leading up to the birth of Christ. St. Luke tells us that, when Mary visits Elizabeth, after her own encounter with an angel, Elizabeth is immediately filled with the Holy Spirit, and asks, “Who am I, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” Mary in turn is filled with the spirit and utters her Magnificat.
After the circumcision of John the Baptist, Zachary regains the power of speech, which he had lost after being so foolish as to talk back to an angel, and, being filled with the Holy Spirit, gives voice to his canticle. Likewise Simeon, who has waited so long for the coming of the Messiah, and at last, when the Infant Jesus is presented in the Temple, is filled with the same Spirit, and speaks his own canticle of praise, known as the Nunc Dimittis.
And then there were the Magi. They were not part of the people of Israel, yet, though they were Gentiles, surely a still, small voice (one of the Holy Spirit’s ways of speaking to us) must have told them to follow that new star that had recently appeared in the sky, and to do so till it brought them to Bethlehem, to the very house where the Holy Family was staying (in Hebrew, Bethlehem means “House of Bread,” and nothing could be more fitting, when the very Bread of Life was born there).
Perhaps most important of all: When the Holy Spirit acts in the world, that action is most likely to be connected with a new beginning for the whole world or for a particular person’s life. When the Spirit of God was brooding over the waters, it was the creation of the universe that was involved, not just a new beginning but the beginning. When an individual experiences a conversion that turns him back toward God from a life of sin to a life of grace, then that is a beginning of friendship with God.
Christmas, the whole series of events culminating in the conception of Jesus and His birth, is, like the creation itself, a new beginning for the world. It is a new creation, the unimaginably huge event where the people living in darkness and in the shadow of death can begin to experience light and hope, where those who cannot love, a condition Georges Bernanos equated with Hell, can begin to love. It is the beginning of all beginnings, even greater than the creation of the world.
And so, the Holy Spirit is at work all through the Christmas story. And fittingly so, since the Holy Spirit is the love that unites the Father and the Son, and, as such, has been called the Heart of the Holy Trinity. He is the love that overshadowed Mary, the graced one, and brought the very Son of God into her womb.
And so, Glory to God in the highest!
(© 2017 George A. Kendall)
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