Christmas: Platonic love, incarnate love

Oh flowers, oh flowers of the green pine,
Do you have any news of my beloved?
Oh God, and where is he?

Oh flowers, oh flowers of the green bough,
Do you have any news of my sweetheart?
Oh God, and where is he? 

(from Cantigas de Amigo written by King D. Dinis of Portugal (1261-1325))

When Portugal was still part of the Kingdom of Leon the language that was spoken throughout the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula was Galician-Portuguese. A language originated in the artistic world, so that the first writings in this language were the songs about friends and love that the troubadours sang on their way to Santiago de Compostela from France.

"Absence makes the heart grow fonder" – What really characterized these songs of love and friendship was the fact that the lovers were far apart. Meetings were scarce and so, consumed by longing, the lovers lived their love platonically in their imagination and fantasy, fuelled by scarce news and letters. When after a long time, even years, the lovers finally meet, the joy was indescribable...

It was also this way, the love between God and man, man and God was for a long time. A platonic love that was nurtured by the messengers, the prophets whom God sent into the world. Until one day... "For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son," (John 3:16).

In Jesus of Nazareth, born in Bethlehem, humanity and God, God, and humanity, finally meet. This encounter is symbolized in the parable of the wedding guests (Matthew 22:1-14); the wedding in which God marries his son to humanity. A wedding in which the destiny of humanity is united with the destiny of Christ, and vice versa.

Religion and revelation
"Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son..." (Hebrews 1:1-2)

This phrase, from the letter to the Hebrews, can sum up all religions other than Christianity. Religion, from the Latin "religare", means relationship with God and with one’s neighbour. Ever since the human species has been conscious of itself, it has believed in the possible existence of a higher being, transcendent to everything and everyone because it is the creator of everything and everyone. At all times and in all places, man has sought to communicate with this divine being, God, to obtain his favour.

Cellphones, television and radio waves cross our space and we do not hear or see them, but we know that this is the case because when we have the right instruments, we can detect them. Similarly, God also sought to communicate with man and man with God; but this communication is not accessible to everyone either, it is necessary to have a special sensitivity to enter into this communication.

There have always been people with a special sensitivity to communicate with God. In the biblical tradition, the prophets were the designated catalysts for God’s plans for the people and the people’s petitions to God. Communication, however, was not without its difficulties; as in the field of telecommunications, there was a lot of "interference"; the prophet’s personality and character, his defects and prejudices, filtered the message and it did not reach the recipient as it had left the sender. On the other hand, very often these prophets understood that Heaven was closed and God was cloaked in silence.

"O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer; and by night, but find no rest" (Psalm 22:2).  The people of Israel were never satisfied with this communication, which was so lacking, and lived in continual restlessness.

"'Come,' my heart says, 'seek his face!' Your face, Lord, do I seek" (Psalm 22:8). True love never gets used to absence.

Christianity is not a religion, because it does not consist of man’s effort or attempts to reach God; on the contrary, Christianity is a revelation because it is God who seeks man and reveals himself to man. As Jesus said in the gospel, "You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name" John 15:16.

Christmas the day of encounter
"All things have been handed over to me by my Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father; and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him." Matthew 11:27

No matter how hard he tried, man could never reach God on his own; that is why, unlike all other religions, Christianity believes that, because is a Revelation, God did not send messages, he came himself.

At Christmas, we celebrate the great truth that God is not wrapped in silence, but in swaddling cloth and laid in a manger. With the birth of Jesus, God breaks the silence, eliminates the distance and undoes the inaccessibility. Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us, at our doorstep; our travelling companion in life as he was with the disciples on the road to Emmaus.

In Jesus, the true God and true man, the long-awaited meeting of humanity with God and God with humanity finally takes place, a full communication without interference without intermediaries.  The love that was platonic for so long is now tangible.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC

The Inmaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary

Origin of sin and original sin
God created man in his image and likeness; with sin we lose God’s likeness, but we still retain his image. We are no longer as God created us; the sin of our parents has spread through space and time, profoundly altering human nature. Man built his own hell, typified by the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. The flood, to destroy everything and start over, with Noah's family, was the first plan to save the human race. The descendants of Noah soon returned to the sin of their ancestors.

"The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge" (Jeremiah 31:29). Without knowing Mendel's laws of heredity, the Hebrews were already aware that certain evils passed from parents to children. In fact, the sin of Adam and Eve corrupted them, not only existentially as people, but also genetically, so that the consequences would be suffered by the entire human race.

Usurpation of the criterion of good and evil
Man’s pseudo-emancipation, wanting to be like God, having usurped the prerogative of good and evil from God, was the origin of sin or the original sin, which is passed from generation to generation because it has modified the DNA of the human species. Evil has taken root within the human race in such a way that, as Jesus said in Matthew 15:11, "it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles". It is, therefore, not a bad upbringing that makes a person evil; evil is already inside the person.

While the criterion of good and evil was in the center of the Garden of Eden, and belonged exclusively to God, earth was the Kingdom of God; there was peace, unity, consensus, because everyone was submitted to a single criterion. When man, wanting to be like God, placed himself at the centre, stealing the prerogative of good and evil, brought division, then war, subjectivity, arbitrariness, relativism and discord ensued. Everyone wants to be the center. There cannot be two centers; if I have the criterion of good and evil, then you do not have it or I do not recognize that you have it.

Nobody does evil thinking that he is doing evil; Hitler, when he killed 5 million Jews, thought he was doing humanity a service; suicide bombers who kill themselves, killing innocent people, believe they are sacrificing themselves for a greater good; Muslim extremists kill in the name of God...

We are apples with bugs
Parents who work hard to educate their children are stunned when they start lying, stealing and doing all kinds of mischief that they never taught their children. Evil is within us and does not need to be taught. As the psychologist Jung would say, evil belongs to humanity’s collective unconsciousness. Each evil act that an individual carries out is installed in that collective database in such a way that the individuals who are born after, are born with the ability to do all sorts of evil without needing to learn anything because we are all connected to the collective database where everything humans have done evil and good is engraved.

Many people, when they see an apple with a small hole in it, think that the hole was made by a bug when it entered the apple, when the opposite is true, the hole was made by the bug when it came out of the apple.  The bug was an egg that an insect laid inside the apple when it was conceived, that is, when it was still a flower.  We are all apples with a bug, evil is inside us and it only needs a certain situation to reveal itself.
 
It is not as the proverb says, "The situation makes the thief". Everyone, sooner or later, is faced with situations in which they can steal; we are all capable of stealing from the get-go. Stealing or not stealing is going to depend on the degree of education in human values we have at the moment of temptation. Only this degree of education in human values can counteract the innate tendency in all of us.

From Eva to Ave
There are two reasons why God came to us in human form: the first is to tell us, in a definitive way, what God is like, and the second is to tell us what human beings are like and what they should be like. Christ is in fact the measure for the human being, the template for humanity, the one with whom all individuals must measure themselves because he is the norm, he is the model, the paradigm. Christ is the man that God created in Adam, before Adam disobeyed; in fact, Jesus showed, by his words and deeds, that he remained obedient to God all his life.

Just as Christ is the second Adam, Mary is the second Eve. Ave is in fact Eve in reverse. Christ, the son of the Most High God, could not have Eve as his mother, after the sin; for this reason, at the moment of her conception, when the half-cell of Joachim joined with the half-cell of his wife, Anne, God acted to prevent the ruined genes that had been passed down from generation to generation since the sin of Adam and Eve from also passing on to Mary.

Mary was conceived without original sin, because she was destined to be the mother of God’s son. It makes no sense to be incarnate in the human nature that Adam and Eve modified with sin. That is why Mary, who was to be the mother of the Lord, was preserved from this negative inheritance common to all mortals.

In Ethiopia, there is no negative association with the stepmother figure. Often one is the biological mother and the other is the mother who raises and educates. The latter is called "Ingera enat" or the bread mother. When I was studying theology, I had a colleague who called his biological aunt mother, and his biological mother aunt. My colleague had been rejected by his biological mother and taken in by her sister, who raised him. There was so much love between them that when she was terminally ill with cancer, she did not die until she saw her son (biologically her nephew) ordained a priest.

Eve is the biological mother of all the living beings, Mary is our bread mother, of that Eucharistic bread which is her son who was born in a town called Bethlehem, which literally means house of bread, and whom she laid him in a manger, a container where food is eaten, so that we could all be fed by him.

Eve is our progenitor, but she abandoned us to our fate, Mary is the one who provides for our needs when at Cana she says, "They have no wine" (John 2:3).

Eve is the one who taught us to do evil, Mary is the one who educates us and teaches us to do good by pointing to her son and saying, "Do whatever he tells you" (John 2:5).

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC