A Christmas Prayer

Merry Christmas from the friars. For those of you who read Magnificat, this beautiful prayer will be familiar...

On that holy night,
Somehow
It happened.


Somehow,
God took a handful of humanity:
Proud, petulant, passionate;
And a handful of divinity:
Undivided, inexpressible, incomprehensible:
And enclosed them in one small body.


Somehow, the all too human
Touched the divine.
And was not vaporized.
To be human was never the same,
But forever thereafter,
Carried a hint of its close encounter with the perfect.
and forever thereafter,
God was never the same,
But carried a hint of the passion of the mortal.


If God can lie down in a cattle-trough,
is any object safe from transformation?
If peasant girls can be mothers to God,
Is any life safe from the invasion of the eternal?


If all this could happen, O God, 
What places of darkness on our earth
are pregnant with light waiting to be born this night?


If all this could happen, O God, 
Then you could be, and are, anywhere, everywhere,
Waiting to be born this night in the most
unbelievable places,
Perhaps even in our own hearts. Amen.


- Ian Oliver
We Ask Your Blessing: 100 Prayers For Campus Occasions