This from one of St. Augustine's sermons on the birth of Christ:What praise must we not utter, what thanks, to the love of God! Who loved us so much that for our sakes he would be made in time through whom time was made, so that in the world he might be younger in age than many of his servants, hewho in his eternity is older than the world itself, that the one who created man might become a man, that he might be created froma motherhe created, that he might be carried in arms he formed, might suck at breasts he filled; that the Word without whom human eloquence is dumb might in dumb infancy wail in a crib.See what God became for you; recognize what such great lowliness teaches, even in a teacher who cannot yet speak. Once in paradise you were so full of words that you gave names to all living things; but for your sake your Creator lay as an infant and could not even call his mother by her name. When you failed to obey, you lost yourself in a broad garden of fruitful trees; in his obedience he came into thenarrowest of dwellings so that he might search for the dead by dying. Although you were a man, you wished to be God, andwere lost; he, although he was God, wished to be a man so that he might find what had been lost. Human pride pressed you down so much that only divine lowliness could raise you.

Rev. Joseph A. Komonchak, professor emeritus of the School of Theology and Religious Studies at the Catholic University of America, is a retired priest of the Archdiocese of New York.

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