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Meditation on the mystery of the incarnation                

Hilary Elliott

Nativity, James B. Janknegt, 1995

Give me the gift of imagination to see you, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, the Three Persons in One, and so love you more, and follow you closely wherever you lead me, day by day.

Imagine the Three persons of the Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, seated together. They are surveying the beautiful world that they had created with such love, tenderness and care.

But now they are looking down with tears, with dismay, with anger.

What are they seeing? What are they hearing? What are they smelling?

There are gunshots as violence erupts on city streets. Guns that are being used to settle disputes. Political disputes and gang disputes and disputes over drugs and over land.

In another country they are seeing religious disputes. Islamic terrorists killing, and beheading innocent victims in churches in concerts on the streets and in the classrooms. 

Beneath on the pavement they see the huddled figures in sleeping bags of those with no home and no healthcare and no interests and no hope.

 They are watching with distress the frail inflatables full of migrants tossed around by mountainous waves in the English Channel. Sometimes lives are lost and sometimes it is small children that drown.

 They smell forest fires blazing down the west coast of the United States and Canada. Fires out of control, destroying all living things in their path.

 They are hearing the constant whine of the chain saw as illegal loggers continue to cut down more of the Amazon rainforest while the authorities turn a blind eye.

 But over it all they are watching the unfolding horror of the global pandemic Covid 19.

 They observe the doctors and nurses struggling to help the dying. They are seeing how few resources some have to fight this deadly disease. They see the scientists trying to produce a vaccine. They see those who weep and those who mourn and those who suffer and those who have lost hope. And it does indeed look hopeless. People are tempted to give up and lose hope and some have already lost hope.

 But because of their deep and everlasting love the Three Persons, Father Son and Holy Ghost have not lost hope. They do not give up. They confer together. It is the Son who speaks. After some time and some silence the Son says, “I will go.” I will go in the humblest and most vulnerable and defenceless way there is. I will go to them as a baby. A baby born to a single mother. A woman without power and influence, one of a race under lockdown by a foreign power in a remote and unimportant part of the empire.

Under the heavy weight of a strict religion with the harshest of interpretations of the law.

 “I will go” said the Son, “and I will show them what love is, how far it goes and what it costs.”

 And all Three Persons were of one heart and mind and together they said “Yes.”