Awaiting Christmas

“We often have the tendency, due to the language we use, to have an inexact notion of what happened in Nazareth when the angel relayed to the Holy Virgin that the Word had become flesh. An anthropomorphic mentality makes us think of God as a distant person up there in the heavens, who sends his Son to a far-off place to become man.

It is not so. God is everywhere. He is in heaven, on earth and in every place. God was thus in the little room of the Virgin in Nazareth, when the angel appeared to her. He was, however, infinitely distant from mankind due to the abyss of sin and because of their natural smallness.

The instant in which the Virgin pronounced her ‘fiat,’ God espoused human nature in her pure womb, espoused the creature, and undertook an unimaginable act of bridging the divinity withthe universe.

Since then, he is always in our midst.

That infinite distance which our imagination expressed, almost placing God far from us, above in the heavens, has been negated: he is on earth, he is our co-citizen.”

Pasquale Foresi, Theology of sociality (Teologia della socialità), Città Nuova 1963,  p. 66