Centre for Applied Carmelite Spirituality (CACS)'s Podcast
The Centre for Applied Carmelite Spirituality (CACS) is a centre for research and formation that promotes spiritual formation and renewal, drawing on the rich resources of the venerable Carmelite tradition.
It is an apostolate of the Anglo-Irish Province of the Discalced Carmelites, based at the Carmelite Priory at Boars Hill, Oxford, England.
OUR MISSION
CACS strives to achieve its mission through structured study and formation programmes in spirituality from the Carmelite perspective, especially Prayer and Spiritual Direction. At the Centre for Applied Carmelite Spirituality, you are welcome to enter into the silence where God’s voice is heard in prayer, word and sacrament, inviting you to journey ever more deeply into a place of growth and wholeness. Our goal is to bring people to experience a life-transforming friendship with God through a lived experience of Carmelite spirituality that is authentic to its biblical roots.
Centre for Applied Carmelite Spirituality (CACS)'s Podcast
Christmas Eve, Year A
CHRISTMAS EVE, YEAR A
Word & Wisdom is a weekly reflection on the Sunday’s scriptures and the wisdom of the Carmelite tradition. It promises to offer you real spiritual food to sustain you on the journey.
This Word and Wisdom Podcast is brought to you by the Centre for Applied Carmelite Spirituality, Oxford (carmelite.uk.net).
To receive audio and written copies, subscribe by emailing podcasts@cacs.org.uk
To connect with our Living Prayer Podcast on Youtube, kindly click: https://www.youtube.com/@CACSOxford
We gather in the deep silence of verse 9. A silence that the Carmelite heart knows is not empty but teeming with presence. St. Luke begins his narrative not in heaven but with the cold hard facts of earthly history. Caesar Augustus issued a decree.
The whole world is in motion at the command of the man who called himself a God and the saviour of the world. Yet as the great engines of the Roman Empire shine, the true axis of history shifts imperceptibly to a small stable in the Judean hills. There is a profound irony here that Pope Benedict XVI often highlighted.
The Emperor dominates the world but God enters through the door of the lowly. True glory is not found in the marble of Rome but in the stable of Bethlehem. When the glory of the Lord finally breaks through, it shines not upon the imperial palace but around shepherds.
They are now weaned, terrified by the uncreated light. Yet the angel offers a sign that seems entirely contradictory to this glory. You will find a baby wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.
This is a central paradox of Christmas, the sign of God's power in his powerlessness. The sign of the infinite is that he allowed himself to be bound. St. Luke mentions these swaddling clothes twice.
For the church fathers, they reveal a threefold mystery, the icon of wisdom. King Solomon wrote, I was nursed in swaddling clothes for there is no king who had a different beginning. Jesus is the new Solomon, the true wisdom stripped of earthly gold, the lamb of God.
Shepherds would swaddle a newborn lamb to keep it unblemished for sacrifice. Here lies the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, the shadow of the cross. Most poignantly, the swaddling bands point to the leaning clothes of the tomb.
In the iconographic tradition, the manger is often depicted as a stone coffin. He accepts the binding of human mortality to untie us from the bonds of sin. The shepherds hastened to Bethlehem.
They saw the glory in the fields, but in this table, they saw only the poverty. It requires the eyes of faith to see the glory hidden within the poverty. For us, as we stand at the altar tonight, the mystery remains the same.
We do not see flashes of lightning. We see the swaddling clothes of the sacramental species, bread and wine, ordinary elements of the earth. God's glory is safeguarded in humility.
If he appeared in the naked power, we would be crushed. Instead, he comes wrapped in the swaddling clothes of humanity, and now in the appearance of bread, so that we might approach him without fear. Tonight, let us not be deceived by the smallness of the sign.
The bands that beat the infant Jesus are the very bands that hold the universe together. The bands of love.