Dear Members of the Providence College Community:

As we celebrate the Incarnation this year it may help us to grasp the extraordinary nature of what we believe if we stop to consider that God could have become human in a different manner.  God could have become incarnate as a fully-formed adult for some time period, revealed some saving truths, performed some miracles, left a testament of some kind, and then returned to heaven.  In other words, God could have become human without living a real human life.  What we believe, however, is that God not only became human but lived a complete human life, from the womb to the tomb, from birth to death.

As T.S. Eliot's Archbishop of Canterbury points out in his Christmas sermon in Murder in the Cathedral, when we celebrate the Christmas Eucharist, we commemorate both the birth and the death of Christ together.  We telescope Christ's life with the bookends of the wood of the manger and the wood of the Cross.  Those bookends tell us that God chose to live a particular kind of complete human life: the life of the most vulnerable.

Christ knew the vulnerability of life in the womb.  He was born into homelessness, surrounded by animals and disreputable characters (shepherding was not considered a noble profession).   He doubtless cried out in hunger and needed to be held, fed, and sheltered from the elements.   He was immediately subjected to unjust political persecution by King Herod, and he and his family would soon become refugees fleeing into Egypt.  Christ came into this world as vulnerable as a human being can be.

At the other end of his life Christ suffered betrayal and abandonment by his friends, unjust arrest and prosecution, public mockery, the insults and blows of his captors, and public execution by the most painful means that the Romans had devised: crucifixion.  He was killed between criminals and buried quickly in a donated tomb.  Christ died as vulnerable as a human being can be.

In the years between birth and death Christ lived largely as an ordinary laborer, a carpenter.

Why did God choose this kind of a human life?  Why did God take on the most extreme forms of human vulnerability?  The only possible explanation is to show his boundless love for us.  One of God's names is Emmanual, which means God is with us.  In the humility of love, God has taken on the human condition at its most vulnerable out of compassion for us.  In the moments of our lives when we feel the most vulnerable, we know that Christ is with us and that Christ has shown that God's love is more powerful than the forces that threaten us.

The choice to live a vulnerable and complete life with us tells us something not only about God, but also about ourselves: that every aspect of a human life can be charged with divinity.  There is no element of human experience, however unpromising it may seem, that is not capable of revealing the divine presence.  God has taken on a complete human life so that every part of our lives can be shot through with the divine presence within us.  The great exchange of Christmas is that God becomes human so that we can become sharers in divinity in every aspect of our lives.

It is my prayer this Christmas that we might all come to a deeper appreciation both of the depths of God's love for us in living a life with us and of the possibilities latent in our lives to make manifest the divine presence within us.  May the vulnerability of God's love transform our lives; make us more conscious of our capacity to disclose God's presence within us in every aspect of our experience; and make us more conscious of our obligation to respect the capacity of every human life, especially when it is most vulnerable and needy, to bear the image of God.

With deep thanks for your many contributions to the life of Providence College, I extend best wishes for the richest blessings during this holiday season to members of the College community of all faiths.

Brian J. Shanley, O.P.