Christ Is Born! Glorify Him! - A Reflection by Mat. Christina Veselak for Nativity (2025)

Today we are called to celebrate in awe and wonder the mystery of God Himself descending into a human being, with a human body. Taking on human flesh and becoming a human person, so that human persons can take on God and be reunited with Him. This concept is beyond the ability of human minds to comprehend, so scripture uses many different metaphors and images to communicate the impact of God’s love coming into the world in a very real, tangible way. I think the heart has an easier time comprehending it than does the mind, because the heart speaks the language of love.

And, the human heart, each of our hearts, desperately need to be loved, and to offer love. So, in this reflection, I want to move from the sublime to the nitty, gritty reality of our fallen, human lives, into which God Himself entered as a vulnerable, powerless baby. What strikes me about this is that God has made himself accessible. Most of us (but not all) know how to love babies. We have an instinctive movement of the heart to wrap this tiny little thing in connection, warmth and protection. Most of us can also relate to the converse, that of being wrapped in love by God, as if we are still little, tiny babies, still in need of connection, protection, nourishment and the warmth of love. Not all of us received sufficient love when we were born and were still little. Or we were harmed in a variety of ways, large and small, growing up and through the vagaries of adulthood. Abraham Maslow, a psychologist researching and writing in middle of last century, postulated a hierarchy of needs that must be met for us to grow into the fullest expression of our humanness. While the concept has some controversy, it provides a useful structure for us to examine specific ways in which being born into a world of sin sets the stage for our own sinfulness and need for redemption. This hierarchy of needs is as follows (italicized annotations are my additions):

• Physiological: Essential for survival (e.g., food, water, shelter and clothing, and enough resources such as money to ensure continuing access to these. It can also include sleep and health vs chronic physical and mental illness, chronic pain and various forms of disability).
• Safety: Protection and stability. Many of us stay stuck in “survival mode” and never feel safe.
• Love/Belonging: Social relationships and connectedness. Many of us feel deeply disconnected and lonely, even when we do have people around us. We have been too wounded to feel safe enough to let love in. As a result, we may engage in behaviors that drive others away and make ourselves difficult to love.
• Esteem: Recognition and self-respect. Being seen and valued, rather than ignored, devalued, taken-for-granted and invisible. Being able to feel good about ourselves for our contributions to others.
• Self-Actualization: Achieving personal potential. This involves a number of things, including spiritual depth, but I think of it as becoming the fullest of whom we were created to be in all aspects.
• This article explains it more thoroughly, but it is easy to follow. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (https://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html). The expanded pyramid below is taken from this article.

In my mind, the opposite of self-actualization and transcendence is this poem, which I encountered as a teenager.

The Man with the Hoe by Edwin Markham

Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans
Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,
The emptiness of ages in his face,
And on his back the burden of the world.
Who made him dead to rapture and despair,
A thing that grieves not and that never hopes.
Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox?
Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw?
Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow?
Whose breath blew out the light within this brain?
Is this the Thing the Lord God made and gave
To have dominion over sea and land;
To trace the stars and search the heavens for power;
To feel the passion of Eternity?
Is this the Dream He dreamed who shaped the suns
And marked their ways upon the ancient deep?
Down all the stretch of Hell to its last gulf
There is no shape more terrible than this —
More tongued with censure of the world's blind greed —
More filled with signs and portents for the soul —
More fraught with menace to the universe.
What gulfs between him and the seraphim!
Slave of the wheel of labor, what to him
Are Plato and the swing of Pleiades?
What the long reaches of the peaks of song,
The rift of dawn, the reddening of the rose?
Through this dread shape the suffering ages look;
Time's tragedy is in the aching stoop;
Through this dread shape humanity betrayed,
Plundered, profaned, and disinherited,
Cries protest to the Powers that made the world.
A protest that is also a prophecy.
O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
Is this the handiwork you give to God,
This monstrous thing distorted and soul-quenched?
How will you ever straighten up this shape;
Touch it again with immortality;
Give back the upward looking and the light;
Rebuild in it the music and the dream,
Make right the immemorial infamies,
Perfidious wrongs, immedicable woes?
O masters, lords and rulers in all lands
How will the Future reckon with this Man?
How answer his brute question in that hour
When whirlwinds of rebellion shake all shores?
How will it be with kingdoms and with kings —
With those who shaped him to the thing he is —
When this dumb Terror shall rise to judge the world.
After the silence of the centuries?

Inspired by the painting L'homme à la houe by Jean-François Millet. This poem is in the public domain.

Even though most of us have not had our souls destroyed, as has “the man with the hoe”, or the person overcome by addiction, dying on the streets, our lives are lives of struggle, and often great pain. Many of us have holes in our souls, due to a variety of deficits as described in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. How do these holes manifest?

·       Deep emotional pain of loneliness, despair, self-loathing, hatred and fear of others. This pain can be so intolerable that many people flee to the salve of momentary escape into a multitude of mood-altering behaviors, which can then trap us into the living hell of addiction. These are the classic “sins”: drunkenness, promiscuity in both men and women, rage and violence. We live for escape. But escape could be as simple as too much time playing video games, watching TV, or reading romance novels.

·       When we are focused on survival, and living in fear and anxiety, we often cannot relax enough to let in the joy of beauty and love. God reveals Himself through the beauty of music, of art, of nature. God reveals Himself through the sublime. But when we shut down in order to survive, to just get through, it becomes harder to find the presence of God anywhere, and to let Him in through the walls around our souls. Thus, life becomes even darker and more devoid of the life—giving experience of Grace. Despair prevails. Lust and gluttony can become unsatisfying substitutes.

·       Greed, and an insatiable search for safety, security and acceptance. Enough may never feel like enough. We see this in the parables of both the Rich Man and Lazarus, but also the rich man who was so wealthy that he had to build even bigger storage bins to hold all his wealth. It never occurred to them to share. They had to tightly hold on to everything they had acquired. This is the drive behind “keeping up with the Joneses”, having the perfect weight, the right clothes, the right job and social status. We see this in people who marry for the wrong reasons. We also see this in people who are too afraid of being hurt to risk opening up to love or even to just friendship. The shy, or the people who live behind masks so intrenched that they may not even have a real sense of who they truly are, or of who they were created to be.

·       The Ten Commandments give us a bird’s eye view into the behaviors driven by these holes in our souls, which the Lord God condemns. Why does He condemn them? Because while they may be driven by human pain, they cause pain. They destroy community and create distrust. They continue the generational trauma, which we could trace back to Adam and Eve themselves. And most devastating, they become idols. We trust in the work of our hands, rather than in God’s providence. We crave what our neighbor has, rather than being grateful and filled by the riches that we have been given. We seek the illusion of love, rather than being secure in the love and total acceptance that God Himself has for us. Even morality itself can become an idol-the deep fear that if we are not perfectly moral, we will lose God’s favor and be destroyed.

This is the world that God Himself entered as a baby. This is the darkness that requires the Light of Christ to enlighten it. But how?  How exactly does Christ’s incarnation break this bond of sin and death in the nitty gritty of our lives? What difference can God truly make in the daily grind? When we don’t know where the next meal is coming from, or the next rent check? When we are too exhausted or bored to take another step forward? When, whatever it is, we simply can’t take it anymore? When chronic illness or chronic pain in ourselves or a loved one becomes unbearable? When life feels like a prison sentence on a desert island, with the only way-out being death? Totally meaningless? When the deepest heart’s desire is that one had never been born?

This is a life devoid of God’s presence, walled off from His grace, His love and His life. The “wages of sin is death”, this deep disconnection from the Source of ALL. Our “sin” can be our deep soul withdrawal from God, as a result of the sin of others, and the downward spiral of the passions we become trapped in. Thus, “the man with the hoe”.

So, the answer is to become open to God’s presence, to His grace, His love and His life. This is the door that Christ came to open, both ontologically and personally. But this involves a huge paradigm shift in our typical ways of being in the world. And I believe that we cannot truly do this without the deep work of Christ in our hearts.

The challenge for us who have “been baptized in Christ and have put on Christ” to learn how to appropriate this Grace in the struggle and pain of our daily lives. How does Christ actually get born in our hearts and bring His Light into our daily darkness?

The answer is not linear. Our life in Christ grows, often without us even being aware of it. His healing love pervades our soul through a multitude of ways. Our participation in the sacraments and in prayer, worship, fasting and almsgiving are designed to little by little remove the blocks in our souls to His Love and presence. It is this opening to God’s love and presence that allows us to move away from the paradigm of living in the world into the paradigm of living in the Kingdom of Heaven. What might this look like according to Maslow’s hierarchy?

Physiological/Safety: Jesus tells us not to be anxious about our material welfare. He says “Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added unto you”. He is very clear that we are to look to God to supply our physical needs, rather than being lost in frantic acquisition and sleepless worry. Do we actually trust that God will meet our physical needs? Can we focus on gratitude for what He has given us, no matter how meager, while relaxing into the knowledge that He hasn’t actually abandoned us and WILL come through for us, even if not quite as soon as we want Him to? St. Paul tells us, in the middle of his own suffering, to give thanks in all things and to trust that God can and is transforming our souls through the tribulations we face. This includes chronic disability, pain and physical or mental illness. By asking for the gift of trust and faith, often beyond our own meager ability to manifest on our own, and seeking transformation of soul, old traumas of deprivation and harm can slowly heal, deepening our sense of safety and security within God’s love. Furthermore, we are called to share our love and resources with each other, rather than being immobilized by fear or self-pity, which leads to greed. This improves the material well-being of others and supports their sense of safety and security. This is partly the work of the “Body of Christ”, the Church. Sometimes we ourselves can be beneficiaries of this love and generosity. The Lord often answers prayer through the charitable, loving acts of His people.

Finally, the saints of the Church who voluntarily chose and choose poverty, model the love for Christ and His corresponding transformation of our souls, that allow us to transcend all circumstances, and find the Kingdom of Heaven within them.

Love/Belonging/Esteem: We are created with the need to be in loving relationship with each other. Much emotional and spiritual wounding comes from painful breaks in relationship in both childhood and adulthood. Feeling loved and rejected leads to self-hatred, and the hiding and isolation that comes from shame and feeling worthless or invisible. We erect strong shields around us to prevent even more hurt. But this increases our sense of shame and worthlessness, along with our isolation and loneliness. We act prickly or defensive and push others away – before they can reject us! God’s answer to this is to tell us that He knew us while we were in our mother’s womb. That we have a precious place in the Body of Christ with gifts and talents that are to be used, not hidden. That we are precious in his sight and are to be His sons and daughters. That He calls us to Him while we are still sinners. We don’t have to achieve perfection first! We are called to bear one another’s burdens, which breaks isolation. We are to love our neighbor as ourself, which indicates that loving ourselves is a good thing. This ability to receive love and acceptance breaks the need for self-aggrandizement and ego.

The Pre-Communion prayers that we are invited to say every week helps us accept that we are fallen and sinful, so we no longer have to hide, or pretend to be different. When I first started reading them 40 years, ago, they were too painful. The words struck like a knife into the core of my shame and I couldn’t bear to be reminded of how bad I was (at least in my own estimation). This was actually a manifestation of pride though it certainly didn’t feel like it! Now I read them with a feeling of relief (most of the time!). I get to be honest with myself about my actual struggles, because Christ is with me in them, and loves me anyway. Likewise in the sacrament of confession and absolution. Ideally, we feel safe enough with our confessor to share the inward thoughts of our hearts, and our deepest struggles. Just the act of sharing what we can with another person helps break the power of shame. We experience acceptance, and this is very healing. This Holy Sacrament also opens a door for God’s healing and transforming grace to pour through so that over time, God Himself gives us victory over our sins and our brokenness.

The Eucharist itself gives us the opportunity, every time we partake, to open the doors of our hearts ever wider to let in more deeply the Lover of our souls. This is a lifelong struggle because most of the time, we keep our hearts pretty closed. We don’t want anyone, much less God Himself to see the “leprous and sinful” state of our souls.  But, this act of union with Christ Himself, is the ultimate restoration of God and Man. We are finding our way back into the Garden from which Adam and Eve were thrust, and thus healing our own personal experiences of rejection and isolation.

Self-Actualization/Transcendence: Salvation is a “rags to riches” story. We all hear the stories of someone who grew up in pain and poverty and transcended it to live a life worth living. You might be one of those people. But for us as Christians, it goes even deeper. However, let’s start with Maslow. Maslow expanded his initial concept into that shown in the diagram above. He divided human needs into two categories: deficiency needs and growth needs. These are the things we need to survive, and the things we need to thrive. He added cognitive and aesthetic needs to his list, but they are still really the first part of self-actualization and thriving.

Self-actualization is first about finding and developing the human gifts inherent in our genetic make-up. Who were we created to be in our humanness?  Such gifts often run in families, such as musical ability. These gifts are from God and are blessings to others, but also to ourselves as we get to feel the joy of growing into the fullness of such a gift, whatever it may be. Growing into these gifts is an act of synergy between God and us. He gave the innate gift, we have to work hard to develop the gift. We also have to not let the gift consume us to the detriment of other aspects of our soul. But we can let ourselves join with the creative Spirit of God at those moments when we lose ourselves in the joy of creation. Maslow names this experience, transcendence. As we give thanks to God for these gifts, we can actually grow in humility, not pride, because we know that we, ourselves, are not the Source, and we become filled with awe.

The fruit of many of these gifts, which bring beauty, joy, peace or well-being to others can also be doorways into the awareness of God. God gave us the ability not only to co-create beauty with Him, but to also enjoy it through our five senses. We can look at a beautiful sunset, or smell jasmine and be transported out of our humdrum existence into something outside of ourselves – God and His Creation. These are the times that the Holy can break through and transform us, if only for a moment. As we are filled by the sense of God’s glory in these moments, we also can experience awe and gratitude. I am reminded that Christ’s incarnation bridged the deep chasm between the spiritual realm and the material world. The Holy taking on flesh, now allows “flesh” or the material world to be windows into the Holy.

Finally, transcendence can also be understood as the process we all go through of spiritual growth and transformation. As we let down the walls of our heart and allow Christ to reign supreme; as we move through the stages of the spiritual life from purification to theosis, all of the wounds of the past fall away. They have done their job of breaking us open to God’s transforming Love and Grace. We no longer try to be good so that we don’t go to hell, which is a form of bribery, we are becoming Good, in the fullest sense of the word. We no longer struggle to achieve the Fruits of the Spirit, they manifest themselves in us, often unnoticed. It is no longer “I who live, but Christ in me”, as St. Paul says. We are crucified with Christ through the bearing of the many crosses of our pain and suffering, so that we might be resurrected with Him into new life.

“You make souls new through the Spirit, and by water sanctify their body, which is composed of diverse parts, building up the life of man; for as the ’Physician of soul and bodies, with wise forethought, You apply the remedy which each part requires”. Compline for January 5.