A quiet ache — a nostalgia for the infinite — resides deep in every human heart. We tend to forget about it. The noise and activity of our lives drowns it out. Our masks cover it up. Our attempts to control and curate every aspect of life dry it up. We pack our schedules to the brim and climb the social ladder to try to satisfy the ache, but these attempts are futile. We connect with others incessantly, only to find ourselves more disconnected. We numb away the ache with the drug of distraction and find our lives are a collection of fragments, and we are stressed and exhausted trying to hold it all together. 

This is the human state after the Fall — that primordial wound of our separation from God. It is the noise that is not just outside of us but has taken up residence within us, a noise that drowns out and confuses and distorts the quiet longing of every human heart for God. 

Christmas is God’s completely surprising response to our wounded humanity. It did not come from the closed system of our broken world, but from beyond it. God broke through the ceiling of our expectations and shattered our limited possibilities when the Word became flesh and was born in our midst. God’s response is a person. He does not shout from the heavens. He does not remain a distant unmoved mover. In an act of unsurpassed humility and love, he draws near. He becomes small. He makes himself accessible. He who fashioned the cosmos from nothing,  the God who holds the stars in their places, he is here with us. 

This is Christmas: the encounter between our desire and God’s response.

It is Jesus in fact that you seek when you dream of happiness; he is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you; he is the beauty to which you are so attracted; it is he who provokes you with that thirst for fullness that will not let you settle for compromise; it is he who urges you to shed the masks of a false life; it is he who reads in your hearts your most genuine choices, the choices that others try to stifle. — St. John Paul II