Christmas Eve/Day - 24/25 December

Christmas Eve/Day - 24/25 December

The fifth and final candle on the wreath is the Christ candle. While not all Advent wreaths include this additional candle, the centre white candle is lit on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, celebrating the arrival of that which we have been anticipating. Jesus is born and our season of waiting is at an end. With the lighting of the Christ candle, we remember the Light which shines in the darkness - the source of our hope, champion for peace, reason for our joy, and giver of love.

A Christmas Prayer 🙏

Glory to God in the highest!

My precious Lord, Jesus, I adore you with profound love and rejoice in the celebration of Your birth. Your love for us in unfathomable, it is glorious, transforming, awe-inspiring, and deeply   personal. You chose to come and dwell among us, being born into poverty, rejection, and humility. Yet Your mother knew whom she bore. Her heart was filled with the tenderest love as she adored her Child and her God. Help me, dear Lord, to come to love You with the heart of Your Mother. Invite me to adore You with St Joseph and the poor shepherds. Reveal to me the glorious power of Your birth and change my life on account of this perfect gift of Yourself. I love You, dear Lord Jesus. Help me to love You with all my heart. Newborn Saviour of the World, I trust in You. Mother Mary and St Joseph, Pray for me and for all. Amen.

Reflection 🌟

A reflection on the Christmas gospel reading by the Venerable Archbishop Fulton J Sheen.

“'In the beginning was the Word.' Whatever there is in the world, is made according to the thought of God, for all things postulate thought. Every bird, every flower, every tree was made according to an idea existing in the Divine Mind. Prior to His earthly existence, Jesus Christ is eternally God, the Wisdom, the Thought of the Father. In His earthly existence, He is that Thought or Word of God speaking to men. The words of men pass away when they have been conceived and uttered, but the Word of God is eternally uttered and can never cease from utterance.

When finally the scrolls of history are completed down to the last words in time, the saddest of all will be: 'There was no room in the inn.' Out to the hillside to a stable cave, where shepherds sometimes drove their flocks in time of storm, Joseph and Mary went at last for shelter. There, in a place of peace in the lonely abandonment of a cold windswept cave; there, under the floor of the world, He Who is born without a mother in heaven, is born without a father on earth.

Of every other child that is born into the world, friends can say that it resembles his mother. This was the first instance in time that anyone could say that the mother resembled the Child. This is the beautiful paradox of the Child Who made His mother; the mother, too, was only a child. It was also the first time in the history of this world that anyone could ever think of heaven as being anywhere else than 'somewhere up there'; when the Child was in her arms, Mary now looked down to Heaven. In the filthiest place in the world, a stable, Purity was born. He, Who was later to be slaughtered by men acting as beasts, was born among beasts. He, Who would call Himself the 'living Bread descended from Heaven,' was laid in a manger, literally, a place to eat. Centuries before, the Jews had worshipped the golden calf, and the Greeks, the ass. Men bowed down before them as before God. The ox and the ass now were present to make their innocent reparation, bowing down before their God.

The Son of God made man was invited to enter His own world through a back door. Exiled from the earth, He was born under the earth, in a sense, the first Cave Man in recorded history. There He shook the earth to its very foundations. Because He was born in a cave, all who wish to see Him must stoop. To stoop is the mark of humility. The proud refuse to stoop and, therefore, they miss Divinity. Those, however, who bend their egos and enter, find that they are not in a cave at all, but in a new universe where sits a Babe on His mother’s lap, with he world poised on His fingers." (Life of Christ)

MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL! 💖🥳🙏💐