24.12.1993. Almost exactly 30 years ago. It was the day I entered the novitiate of my religious community. Back then, it was still in a small village called Roetgen, somewhere near the German City of Aachen. It was extremely unusual to enter at Christmas, but that’s another story. I can’t remember much about the novitiate. It was cold. And not just in winter. The joke was that when the sun was shining in the rest of Germany, it rained a little less in Roetgen. If it wasn’t snowing. I don’t remember seeing the sun at all during the first three months. „If you can survive that, you can survive anything“ was the motto. And we weren’t exactly rich either. We slept in bunk beds – children’s bunk beds, mind you. My heavier roommate crashed down on me from the top bunk several times. Until I suggested we could swap.

But the mood was good. Despite everything. Despite all the systemic shortcomings, which we only realized many years later … confer the founder’s story, about which we were clueless. But we wanted to answer a call – a call that had reached each of us in different ways. We wanted to prepare ourselves, to be as well prepared as possible for what the Lord would place in our hands. And we wanted to love the Lord. With the bluntness, passion and inexperience of an 18-year-old or – in my case – a 21-year-old.

The oldest among us was 31, and he was the exception. A phd in physics and a black belt in judo. He had given the Mercedes away. Just like that. That left an impression. There was also a seasoned carpenter among us. A math freak. A jack of all trades from just south of Vienna. Several high school graduates. A helicopter engineer from America. The communists wanted to ban our „East German“ from graduation because of the sticker on his guitar „I’m going to church, are you coming?“. But he was too good at sport – so in the end he got through. None of them were crazy – no, not the communists, I mean the buddies in the novitiate.

„Et verbum caro factum est.“ (And the word became flesh). I lie flat on the cold marble floor. The choir chanted the „Kyrie eleison!“. That is how Litany of All Saints during the ordination of priests begins. It’s different when it’s your own. I can`t help myself crying whenever I hear it. A very emotional moment. Rome, December 24, 2003, exactly ten years after I joined. Providence. At least that’s how it seems to me. Christmas has a very priestly flavor for me. God takes on flesh. That’s the whole deal. So easy to say. So immeasurably deep.

In Jesus Christ, divinity and humanity are united in the unity of the second person of the Trinity. This is the common belief of all Christians. The ego, the I that speaks to us in Jesus, the second person of the Trinity, is God himself. When we look into his eyes, it is the eyes of God himself that we see. He is the visible one through whom the invisible God becomes visible.

Perhaps this makes one or two skeptics smile. But. I would have packed my bags long ago if I no longer believed that. Take that away, then Jesus is just one more philosopher of life who teaches us the good life. Good luck with that. The world has it’s fill of them. It is worth while following Jesus, not because he is one way among many ways, one life among many possible lifestyles, one truth among many truths. „The way and the truth and the life“ (John 14:6) can only be claimed by him, against whom all other ways, truths and models of life have to be measured…because he is God. Only then does Jesus Christ and being a Christian make sense. Anyone who does not understand this has not grasped the explosive power of Christianity.

Sometimes it helps me to compare dreams or movies where you suddenly become an eagle and can fly, even though your deepest self remains your own … only that you do this or that as an eagle. The comparison is flawed. Okay. But it still helps me to understand the Incarnation. God becomes fully human. The one who eats and talks and suffers and loves is God himself. The person who acts humanly, has human experience and thinks and speaks as a human being, who sips water at a spring and experiences fatigue, is the eternal Son of the eternal Father. The awesome sublimity of the Incarnation consists in this that we now have a human being among us who is God himself. He wanted to feel and experience for himself what it is like to be one of us. He bridges the infinite chasm between God and man and unites both God and man in the unity of a single person: Jesus Christ. What is essentially and naturally united in him is offered to each of us through the gift of his grace in baptism. Herein also lies the incomprehensible dignity of every human being: his vocation is to become a „son in the Son“ … not just to be called a „child of God“, but to truly share in the life of God himself, to be deified.

You will particularly notice this in holy people. You see them and think to yourself: Boaaa … I have just met a Christian who visibly shows me who God is! This is the „sacramental“ calling of every Christian.

That is why Christ is the actual sacrament par excellence. Because he is the visible sign that not only symbolizes God, but is God. A sacrament makes the invisible visible and effectively present, and does not just point to it symbolically. The seven sacraments of salvation only follow the logic of God’s incarnation itself. For through the sacraments we touch him, are touched by him, come into contact with the almighty presence of the Lord. He is at the same time priest, altar and sacrificial lamb.

The unheard of has happened. Jesus Christ becomes the bridge that man must cross in order to reach God. He is the actual priest, the mediator between God and man, „For one is God; one also is the mediator between God and men, the man Jesus Christ“. (1 Timothy 2:5) But this is the amazing thing: ordination to the priesthood as a sacrament means precisely becoming incorporated in this mediating of Jesus, in his being bridge, shepherd, in his person uniting the divine and human. Oh, priest: remember what you are: a sacrament, a visible sign that is called to make Jesus effectively present in this world. Of course, especially when you act in his person: „I forgive you“, „This is my body“…

By virtue of their baptism, all believers are called to participate in the priestly work of redemption through their prayer, sacrifice and love. And yet. Sacramental priestly ordination is not simply added to the priest as a deepening of baptismal grace, but creates something new in him that was not there before, sealing him „for service before God, to offer gifts and sacrifices for sins.“ (Heb 5:1)

24.12.2023: 30 years of religious life, 20 years a priest. I am very grateful. And I believe more and am – hopefully – more in love than I was back then. And the abuse scandal, the lady who crosses the street to keep her child out of your sight, or the guy who just spits in the street in front of you because you are a priest, and the loss of faith and the plethora of prophets proclaiming „the world will end tomorrow“ have not changed that. And I’m excited, not because we priests are so great at fulfilling all that we are by virtue of our ordination, nor because we are all such great saints or such brilliant and stable bridges – although I pray that we may become more and more so. But because the Lord works. Often inconspicuously. In unusual places. Despite the actual inadequacy. In Bethlehem, in the stable. In your heart. In his church. And we can join in. You too. All of us.

Merry Christmas!

Father George LC