The Crib of Bethlehem

The crib of Bethlehem is as much the school of the spiritual life as the cross is. We begin to learn at the crib, and we finish with the cross; the one contains all the elements of a life of holiness, the other contains its consummation. And as in all sciences it is the elements which are of the greatest importance and necessity, let us devoutly study the crib, and let us try to express in our conduct the truths it teaches. Let us contemplate the Word made flesh, the Son of God Who, for our sakes, became a little child. Let us see what were His interior dispositions at His birth; let us consider what were the exterior circumstances of it, and who those were whom He called to His cradle.

It was His love for His Father and His love for men which attracted Him to earth. The feeling which occupied and filled His Sacred Heart was the desire of offering Himself as a Sacrifice to His Father to repair the glory of God and to save the human race; Saint Paul, speaking as David did, teaches us this. When He came into the world, says this Apostle, Jesus Christ said: "The sacrifices and oblations of the old law did not please Thee, but Thou hast prepared for Me a body. Then I said, Behold I come, O my God! to fulfill Thy will!" And what was this will of God? It was a will infinitely severe, according to which Jesus Christ was to take upon Himself our sins and to bear the heavy weight of the Divine justice. Therefore, when He was born, He united His will to this will of His Father, and submitted Himself to it with the greatest love. From His very cradle He contemplated the cross, He longed after it, and the first desire of His Sacred Human Heart was to die upon the cross to appease His Father's just anger and to redeem us.

Let us learn from this that the cross must be the chief object of the interior life, that the first thing God presents us with is the cross, and that the first feeling of a heart which gives itself to God is the accepting of the cross. Now, whoever accepts the cross means by that a total forgetfulness of self, a total loss of self in God, and a complete sacrifice of all his own interests, that he may think only of the interests of God. God alone knows how far this sacrifice ought to extend, since it is God Who proposes it to us, Who inspires us with courage to accept it, and Who gives us the strength to accomplish His will. But we on our part must set no bounds to our sacrifice; we must accept it in its fullest extent, and without any restriction, we must contemplate it without ceasing, and must long after its consummation as our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ did.

But why should He have been born a little child? Why not have come into the world, as Adam did, as a perfect man?

No doubt He could have done so, if He would, but He had His reasons for preferring the state of infancy. And the principal of these reasons was, that He wished to teach us that, from the moment we give ourselves to God, we must put aside and trample under foot our own judgment, our own will, and our own strength; that we must go back to the smallness and the weakness and the foolishness of a little child; that all our past life must be blotted out, and that we must enter upon a new state of existence, a new life, of which God alone must be the principle. And what is this new life? It consists in a perfect dependence upon Divine grace, in simplicity and obedience. Let us look upon Jesus Christ in the crib; He adored His Father as perfectly there as upon the cross. But His adoration was confined in His Sacred Heart; He said nothing, He did nothing, He was as it were annihilated; and it was in this very annihilation that the perfection of His adoration consisted. Let us imagine this, let us dwell upon this, we who complain continually that we are before God as if we were brutes, without thoughts or words or actions. This passive state, which is death to self-love, is incomparably more pleasing to God than anything, however sublime, which our mind or our heart or our mouth could express to Him. To be silent before God, to humble ourselves, to annihilate ourselves, to be in His presence as though we were not, this is to adore Him perfectly in spirit and in truth. What need has God of our sublime lights, and our exalted sentiments, which only nourish in us a secret pride and a vain complacency in ourselves? The nearer our prayer approaches to the prayer of the Infant Jesus, the more humbling and debasing it seems in our own eyes, the higher and more perfect it is in the eyes of God.

Let us pass on to the exterior circumstances of the birth of Jesus. Repulsed and driven away from one inn after another, Mary was obliged to retire into a poor stable; and it was there that the Son of God was born, in the midst of poverty, humiliation, and suffering.

A manger, strewn with a little straw, served Him for a cradle; He was wrapped in poor swaddling clothes; in the middle of the night, in the most severe season of the year, in a place open to all the winds of heaven, His tender and delicate body was exposed to the cold and inclement air. No one assisted at His birth; no one but His Blessed Mother was there to give Him any aid or any comfort.

What an entrance into the world for the Son of God, for Him Who came to redeem the world, and Who from the very beginning was announced to our first parents as the Deliverer of the human race! Who could ever have believed that He would choose for Himself a birth so poor, so obscure, so suffering?

But how instructive all the circumstances of this birth are for those whom the Holy Spirit brings to a new birth in the interior life! In this Divine Infant they find a perfect model of the three virtues which must be henceforth their inseparable companions: a perfect detachment from all the good things of this earth, to be carried as far as the most rigorous penance, if God wishes it; a sovereign contempt for all the honours of the world, so that they wish not only to be ignored by the world, but to be ridiculed and despised by it; and an absolute renunciation of all earthly pleasures, carried to such an extent that, instead, they devote their bodies to every kind of mortification.

These are the three virtues which the Infant Jesus teaches to His loving spiritual children. And what He chose then at His birth, He loved and practised all His life long. He was always poor, living by the labour of His own hands, not having where to lay His head; He was always either unknown to the world or a butt for its calumnies, its contempt, and its persecution. He refused Himself every pleasure, and He suffered in His private life and in His public life every privation and every bodily pang that can be imagined. His death on the cross was only in a higher degree the practice of these same virtues. Let us then also embrace them on our entrance upon the spiritual life, and let us never separate ourselves from them.

Finally, who are those whom Jesus admitted to His cradle? It is a very remarkable thing that all those who appeared there had been summoned either by a heavenly voice or a miraculous sign. This teaches us, that if we wish to enter upon the way of perfection, of which the crib pictures to us the beginning, we must have a Divine vocation, and that no one can enter there unless he is called. But we can on our part bring some preparation for this Divine vocation, and for this our dispositions should be the same as those of the shepherds and the Magi.

We must then be simple, poor in spirit, and humble, as the shepherds were; we must have, like them, a great uprightness of heart, and we must either be in a state of innocence or we must have broken for ever with every habit of sin. It is very often persons of low condition, of obscure and retired life, persons unknown and despised by the world, whom God calls to the interior life. More than this, the shepherds watched even in the night over their flocks; which shows us that great watchfulness over ourselves, the fear of God, the flight from all dangerous occasions, and great tenderness of conscience, prepare us for the heavenly vocation. The shepherds lent an attentive ear to the message of the angels they believed it at once, without reasoning or reflecting upon it; they left all, and set out immediately to adore the new-born Child. Thus the soul ought to listen attentively for the voice of God in her heart, she ought to believe His word with a blind and obedient faith, she ought to leave everything to follow quickly and faithfully the call of Divine grace.

In the person of the Magi, great and learned souls are also called to the cradle of the Son of God; but they must be humble as well as great, they must be detached from all, and ready to sacrifice all to respond to the call of God learned souls without self-sufficiency, without presumption, obedient to the Divine light, and submitting to?t all the reasonings of human wisdom. Such was Saint Louis of France; such was Saint Augustine; such have been many saints of both sexes, distinguished either by the nobility of their birth and dignity or by the greatness of their genius and knowledge.

The character of Herod, of the Pharisees, of the priests and doctors of the law, acquaint us with those whom Jesus rejects, and who on their own part make no use of the ordinary means of grace either to know or to practise the spiritual life.

- taken from Manual for Interior Souls, by Father Jean Nicolas Grou