A Message for Christmas from Msgr. Celano

On Christmas Eve in 1968, Apollo 8 was in orbit around the moon. It was the first time in history that human beings could look back at our planet from an entirely new vantage point and see it for what it is: a “pale blue dot," as astronomer Carl Sagan called it, afloat in the infinite ocean of space. The Apollo 8 astronauts chose that moment to turn their cameras back on the earth, rising over the lunar horizon, and began to read from the Book of Genesis, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth…” I was 9 years old then, and I can still see that grainy black and white image of the earth on our TV set and hear the crackling voices of the astronauts reading those words of Scripture.

The place we call home is but a rock orbiting a star, one of billions of stars that make up this galaxy, one galaxy among billions in the known universe. Set against this background, who are we, really? What possible reason can our existence have, really, in the infinite darkness?

Neither science nor religion can prove or disprove that which, by its very definition exists apart from creation, is not subject to its laws, yet grounds the very existence of all that is. If there is nothing which transcends this existence, then there is no absolute meaning to our existence save what we give it for the short time we are here. In the end, that meaning will die with us. But if there is something, Someone, whose Being cannot be proven in a mathematical equation or spliced apart in a particle collider, a reality that both appeals to reason and yet remains beyond reason’s ability to comprehend, then our very existence is more than a remarkable cosmic accident. We are “on purpose.”

We may be a “pale blue dot” in the darkness, but the God, who in the beginning made the heavens and the earth, has come to us. In our search for meaning, in our search for God, it is God who has undertaken the longest part of the journey.

In the end, to celebrate what the Church celebrates on Christmas is to encounter the awesome mystery of the Coming of God in the Flesh – the Coming of God in our littleness and obscurity. That is why Christmas is more than the commemoration of a birth. Christmas is a wedding feast, the marriage of the human with the divine. Christmas is the Bridegroom searching for His bride, the Lover looking for His beloved. In all our restless seeking and unfulfilled longings, we discover in the Child of Bethlehem that we are the sought after; we are the Bride; we are the beloved, because here on this pale blue dot, the third rock from the sun, the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth, and He is among us still.