Hiking through high passes in the French Alps in 1790 .... .... and I remind you that this would have been seen as coming into the near foothills of Heaven itself. Shelley wrote of Mont Blanc, of the French Alp summit of Mont Blanc, as being mysterious, inscutable, picturing its swirling winds and silent snows that no human eye had beheld, no human hand that touched, no footfall had blemished because nobody had climbed that high by these years. It would have been the nineteenth century which would have been the years of terrestial exploration and the twentieth century. Sir Edmund Hillary is contemporary of ours, the first man to scale to the summit of Everest.

So let us return to William Wordsworth hiking through the high passes in the near foothills of Heaven, beholding the dangerous and beautiful sublime in God's Creation, encountering cataracts exploding into deep ravines, coming upon ancient, decaying woods and sprouting new trees. He wrote,

More than a century later, the Swiss psychiatrist C. G. Jung meditated on these same types and symbols, but not in the Alps. He saw them in the exploding cataracts and deep ravines and birth and death as glyphs encoded upon the human psyche, a different "near foothills unto Heaven," the interior Alps. He called these archetypes. And what Wordsworth saw as the "workings of One Mind" (famously a devout Christian) Jung called the "Collective Unconscious" — this One Mind, which we all participate in, from which we cannot stray, whose glyphs are encoded in us. And, of course, God wrote (through inspiration) that He encoded the Law on the fleshly tablets of our hearts before He encoded them in stone.

Jung was not a Christian per se, but Jung scholars (recently Murray Stein) have shown how Christianity illuminated his research in psychology. There is no evidence that he read the Greek Fathers.

It is ironic then that these moderns, Wordsworth and Jung, touched upon something that the Early Church Fathers understood very clearly eighteen centuries earlier. Origen of Alexandria understood that Holy Scripture was not just any collection of books. Scripture must be read on four levels:

The corollary of this far-reaching principle is that the events around us, and, foremost, our own lives, must also be interpreted allegorically, spiritually. Yes, there is a literal meaning. For example, in due time, Sr. Marty and Sr. Maryann will be preparing breakfast. That breakfast will also have a spiritual meaning as we sit down together as a community consecrated to God to be nourished in that love. We give thanks for the blessed hands that have prepared ....

Each of us participates in an allegory. And each of our lives is an allegorical book whose meaning is interwoven with our salvation, a meaning that will be unlocked when we die and we see our lives in the face of the Lord.

These are the types and symbols of Eternity including the Divine appointments that have been ordained by God — those crossroads that we encounter along the way, in which God acts vividly in our lives. Both of you are consecrated to God as nuns. I am a priest. Things happened. God acted. We were called. What do we do now? Divine appointments.

Here in the Season of the Nativity, let us consider the transformative power signified by the conception of a child, a very great crossroads: or should I say, a very great milestone a world-changing milestone: the advent of a child, named in the womb.

This very great revelation might begin with a little sentence: "Darling, I have news: I am expecting." Expecting — with this single word, mountains are moved. Lives are changed. Identities are transmuted. "Put away your childish things" (1 Cor 13:11), admonishes St. Paul. "You are like babies who need milk!" he laments in the Epistle to the Hebrews (Heb 5:12), speaking to the necessity of maturing. "When I became a man I put away childish things," he told the congregation at Corinth.

"Grow up!" Now, here is a core principle of Christian life .... and much, much more that. For the failure to mature and to take hold in our lives goes to the root of humanity's Fall from Grace, as we read in the near-Apostolic Father, Irenaeus of Lyons (ordained by Polycarp). The Fall of Man, St. Irenaeus wrote, is a case of arrested development. Adam and Eve have been born into the world as infants as we all are. As we encounter them in Eden in the opening chapters of Genesis, they are still in their selfish adolescence. And they rebel against Heaven in their teenage insolence. You see, they had been given everything on earth — talk about being spoiled! — and in due time all was to become theirs even the things of God, which would not subtract from God .... no, it would add to God (if such a thing were possible). But they wanted it now. Eve wanted everything and the things of God now, like the Prodigal Son making his ridiculous demands to the father. I want it now! In that sense, Eve and Adam, as well as the Son of the parable, have refused to mature, to develop, to come into fullness. They stubbornly hang on to their childishness, yet claim the prerogatives of well-seasoned adulthood, too.

Can we picture this? "I'll handle it from here!" they announce. I am sure you've seen the little note circulated among frustrated parents during the 1980's, addressed to teenage rudeness: "Then why don't you get out of the house and pay your own rent while you still know everything in the world."

This disjunction between immaturity and true maturity is a painful disjunction. It is a crisis in which hangs the fate of the whole world, certainly the fate of mankind in Eden.

When we reflect on this, we see the truth of it, even in the space of our own lives and the world all around us.

The little word, expecting is a Word of Power, coeval with God's Word of Creational Power, the magic of new life, the greatest miracle commonly in seen in life: the creation of a child. The word expecting is like a magic wand, utterly transforming everything with a single stroke. Only a second ago those who were children become parents. Mothers and fathers suddenly become grandmothers and grandfathers. New and holy vocation is bestowed. The old things rapidly are passing away. The new sweeps them aside changing everything.

Perhaps the expectant mother and her husband still cling to childish ways. They must now take hold and become the men and women whom their children will need. No longer can the mother be the petulant and indulged "princess." No longer can the father be the disheveled teenager in search of a mother to pick up after him. The time has passed for them to be acolyte: they must now become mentor and master of a new life entrusted to them by God. Words that seemed distant, even alien, not long ago now become urgently near: judicious, stable, dependable, even sage. For they are to become the lifeworld, the atmosphere, the oxygen of the most important beloved of their lives: their daughter or son.

To resist this new vocation — refusing to become a mother or grandmother, a father or grandfather — would have the force of defiling us, inducting us into an identity we rightly call "the grotesque." Have you met the grandmother, wearing revealing clothing, who believes she is young and hip and, pardon me, sexy? Do you know the grandfather who rides a Harley Fatboy, with a bandana tied around his forehead, sporting a ponytail, and going out for new tattoos. He tells everyone, "This old outlaw's had a good run" — a sentence I have heard more than once.

Such people are not lifegivers. They suck all the energy out of the room. Family occasions are ruined when they walk into the room demanding attention. They use up all the oxygen. They embody the Fall from Grace. We fall from Grace all over again with such people, for, yes, our lives do touch other people, do affect the outcome the worlds around us.

The Fall from Grace — a phrase signifying egotism, selfishness, delusion, insolence, and, yes, incurable diseases and disgraceful deaths.

Have you met people who have fulfilled the awful duty of cleaning up after such lives — parents, grandparents, or unmarried siblings after they are found dead? I have. We hear of the Hefty bags filled with pornography, sex toys, and other trash; who have flushed opioids and benzos down the toilet; who have had to wipe computer memories of vile and obscene pictures; and, then, charged with the task of setting aside the consecrated space of a church to .... "celebrate" their lives.

The Roman Church at one point had to forbid eulogies because these included a celebration of the outlaw life. This fact discloses something very important, which is the thought, shared by many, that it is possible to have both, that it is possible to live a vile life and then to be celebrated in a church and then whisked off to Heaven. Tragically, this scenario is entertained in many more minds than any of us would care to think about.

What can we say about lives that were not lifegiving but rather life-subtracting? They were the ones who rejected obligations that come with newborn life and the rearing of children. Too bad, for they turned their backs on the greatest gift they would ever receive. Little children were not taking anything away from them but rather giving them everything — even the sacred gift of decency and purity as the parent would be invited into the world and mind of an innocent child. To enter into that garden once more. People have told me, weeping, "If only I could enter that world once again if only an afternoon!"

A child is born, and a son is given unto us. And the recipients of this gift are no longer to be carried. They must now be the ones who who must bear and nurture and defend the weak and the vulnerable, certainly their own children .... and, before long, their frail parents, as well, as Sr. Marty has. They are to become the salt of the earth and the light of the world. And God equips them for this holy work. He says, "Here, you'll need this" .... which is the experience of raising a child.

New birth is a force of nature, an earth movement carrying everything along in its wake. The infant appears as a change agent sent from Heaven bearing the Divine gift of new life for all. This little figure will announce great tidings from God: "Grow up!"

Young men of the world, "Now hear this!" No more can you party till dawn. No longer can you close the bar or go on pub crawls. Gone are the days of Tequila shooters or smoking weed with giddy friends descending into infantile stupidity and worse.

One of our neighbors died from that "worse." He got drunk one night with his friends and then went off to a filthy place to get tattoos .... which killed him from the diseases they communicated.

Young women of the world, "Attend! Wisdom!" No longer can you dress scantily seeking to invite the glances of passersby. The days are over for wearing thong bikinis at the beach or the lake. How would you like to join your family for a beach day and find that your mother and grandmother were wearing string bikinis?

Would it be fair to ask how many of these people — the would-be mothers and father, the should-have-been grandparents — how many of them have murdered their unborn children or grandchildren in order to secure what they perceive to be their freedom? We have just reviewed the pictures of that kind of freedom.

Can we not plainly see that all nativities save us from our sins? In this sense, each newborn child is a light-bringer, leading us out of the darkness of foolishness, egoism, or narcissism.

To be sure, another and more audacious egotist has appeared, and she or he most certainly is the center of the world issuing demands day and night especially in the early months. And this shake-up is good and necessary, for every great transformation requires a shake-up. Everything must be broken loose from its anchorage. Every piece of the holy puzzle must be in motion, even airborne, for a new world is coalescing from these most promising particles. It is called a family. And the man who once was just a boy will now bear an honorable title, (however unlooked for): father. And the woman who once was a girl will now bear that holiest of all names: mother. All this is of God, and we bow before it, we venerate it, we reverence it. It is not for nothing that we call the Queen of Heaven, the "Holy Mother."

☦

"Well," I replied "a miracle is happening in your lives!"

They smiled and nodded. (Oh, that was a relief!)

May I ask a personal question? Are you in love?"

"Oh, yes!" John replied. "Emma is my whole world! I love her with all my heart!"

Then, Emma piped up immediately. She beamed and said, "John is everything to me. My mind is always drifting toward him. I love him completely. He is my other self."

"Are you planning marriage?" I asked. "Plainly, the news from Heaven is that you will be dying to your old lives as individuals, and you are being born into one being, one-bone, one-flesh."

They liked this idea. And then John said, frowning, "My parents say that I am too young to get married. They say, I have my whole life before me."

"But didn't you just tell me a moment ago that your whole life is Emma?" I asked.

Emma then spoke up. "Yes, it's the same with my parents. They are totally against this. They say I must not turn my back on my future." And then she began to sob as she told me that her parents suggested she go to Planned Parenthood for an abortion.

We sat in silence as all of these things sank in. Then, I told them, "John, Emma, I have bad news for you. But, perhaps, you already know this in one way or another. Your parents suffer from delusions. Phrases like 'your future' or 'your whole life' are not real things. These are constructs. There is no future, no fully formed future, out there just awaiting you. You do not sit and wait for your future to be presented to you. You do not wave a ticket in the air and say, 'That's my future! I claim it!' There is only today and then the day after that and so forth. What we think moment by moment and what we do day by day will someday become our past. It will be a beautiful past with cherished memories or it will be unbeautiful past depending on how we live each day. But our future? That is an illusion. This concept your parents have accepted about being 'the captain of your fate' is also a delusion. No one is the captain of his fate. Our role in life can only be to respond to the things that happen to us and to do this in a godly way. You see, this is all the control we have. It is not so much how we act, but how we react ..... to the things that happen to us. But controlling the things that happen to us? No one has that power."

I could see in his face that this ran against the grain of everything John had been taught. "But look at you!" he blurted out. "The university catalogue says that you have a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins. You're getting another terminal degree from Yale. You've been a professor in both the humanities and the sciences. You're exactly what my father would call the 'master of his fate.'"

I told him, "I am happy to share my personal details with you. As I look back over my life, I see two general trends: first, every big thing that I had ever planned never came to be; second, every big thing that came to be I never planned. Things happened. I responded. Look at me today: I am a chaplain. Only a month ago, I faced a dozen people on my diocese's Commission on Ministry. A priest at the table demanded to know, 'Why must you become a priest?! You could enter a helping profession in some other way.'"

I replied, "This wasn't my idea. I already have a career. But something very great has happened. God has called me out of my former life into a new life which is the priesthood. If my 'record of call' (a document recounting many years, which I had shared with the commission) is not a true call, is not an honest call, then please tell me. For this is why God has made Commissions on Ministry. Your first duty is to demand to see the call statement, then to determine if the call is authentic. But in deciding such things, we do so with a heathly sense of dread: we do not toy with God.

"John, Emma, God has called you. He has called you to a vocation much holier than the priesthood, or, pardon me Sisters, to consecrated life as a nun. He has called you to be a mother and a father. He has given you the holy work of presenting a new family to the world.

"We do not know exactly what lies ahead. Your parents don't, and you don't. None of us do. But this much we know: that if your true love is consecrated in holy marriage, and if you love God, Who has bestowed this gift of love and this child and each other, then you will know joys that few experience in common hours. We know that if you continue to reverence each other and this love and this child that you will be blessed, even transformed into a wonderful goodness all of your lives. But if you turn your back on all these wonderful gifts God has bestowed, you will not be blessed. For then you will have parted ways with God's wonderful power and hopes, which He has poured into your lives.

☦

As our own lives are a microcosm of the world that God made, let us be open to the Divine sinews of our own daily lives. Yes, by touching the Creation with His Divinity, God at His human conception renovated our whole lifeworld. St. Athanasius wrote, He flipped the telos of everything from death to life. His Incarnation would change everything. As Simeon said at the Meeting in the Temple, this Child will be a sign of contradiction. With the advent of His Life among us, the Kingdom of Heaven descends upon a twisted world that refuses to square with its imperishable laws of goodness, justice, and mercy. A huge conflict now ensues.

By this fact, every nativity bears His Divine stamp. Every new child born recalls the Child born in Bethlehem. Does not each new life bear His Image? The imprimatur is upon it. And unless we make the heart and mind of a child our own, then we cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven (Mk 10:15, Mt 8:3). If we should harm one of these little ones in our selfish obstinacy, including riding away on a Harley, it would be better that a millstone be hung about our necks and we were thrown into the sea (Mt 8:6, Lu 17:2).

And this little child (every little child) will save us from our sins, for this new birth will mean death to our pridefulness and egotism and, yes, wandering minds .... if we will embrace the vocation of parenthood with self-giving love, attending to this new little personality, God has brought into the world unfolding right before our eyes. I said last week that if parents sing into womb of a mother who has been pregnant sixteen weeks or play a recorder or a guitar or even hum a melody, then that child will remember those songs, will respond when they hear it has birthed infants. Now here is a little personality having lived only sixteen weeks in the womb with her own likes and dislikes.

If we will do this, if we will enter into the purity and innocence of that little world, we will learn something we once knew, which is our own purity and innocence and goodness. Our hearts will become tender once again. Our consciences will awaken from a long, perhaps drug-induced, sleep. And we might once more look out on a clear Saturday morning seeing each blade of grass and leaf sharply drawn upon our minds in its freshness and its fragrant blooms carried with its immediacy into our nostrils ..... Do you remember?! This is the gift of new life. This it he gift of childhood. And "The thoughts of childhood," Longfellow wrote, "are long, long thoughts."

May we be always be willing to die to our former selves that new life once again be conferred upon us.