By Fr. Benedict Kiely
“O God, be gracious and bless us and let your face make its light shine upon us.” Thus begins Psalm 68, which is usually prayed in the Daily Office, or Breviary, at the beginning of the day. In the Gospel of St. John, Philip says to Jesus: “Show us the Father and that will be enough for us.” Jesus responds: “Philip, whoever has seen Me has seen the Father.” The light that shines from the face of Christ is the light of the Father. The blessing of contemplating the face of Christ is the gift that we will soon celebrate at Christmas: God has become man, and we can look upon Him.
This is the reason why we venerate sacred images and, in a special way, icons, because of the Incarnation. We do not worship the images, but they become a window, a portal, through which we can enter into the divine mystery and have, in a very real sense, an encounter with the One who appears in them. A holy icon of the face of Christ, for example, is a way of contemplating the sacred humanity and divinity of the Lord, and of feeling the blessing, the warmth, and the light of His face.
In Aaron’s priestly blessing in the Old Testament, in the Book of Numbers, he prays that the “Lord make his face shine upon you… the Lord lift up his face toward you and grant you peace.”
The peace of Christ, which St. Paul tells us surpasses all human understanding, comes from the radiance of the Lord’s face. It is a presence that warms, that dispels the sadness of weariness and discouragement.
In addition to the need to cultivate gratitude for the wonderful gift of the Word made flesh, Advent is a time to expel that enervating weariness, physical and spiritual, and the easy desolation that comes both from forgetting what Christmas really means and from the slavery to which we are subjected by the torrent of bad news that surrounds us.
Thomas of Celano, the first biographer of St. Francis of Assisi, to whom the invention of the Christmas crib is usually attributed, complete with the Ox and the Donkey, wrote that one of the reasons why St. Francis decided to create the scene of the Manger was because the “love of the world for Christ had grown cold.”
The creation of that scene of Christ’s birth—today often too saccharine and unrealistic—in the 13th century, when perhaps hardened hearts melted more easily than those of today, made cynical by a loveless secularism, allowed, according to legend, some to even see the Baby Jesus moving in the manger.
Chesterton, that man who loved Christmas even more than Dickens, often wrote about the contrast between the warmth and comfort of the home, the “cosiness,” as he called it, and the rain, the cold, and the snow outside. Christ, he said, “is not just a summer sun for the prosperous, but a winter fire for the miserable.” To lack the warmth of Christ is to be more than miserable. The cold that comes freezes the body and the soul.
Paradoxically, especially for those who detest winter in the Western hemisphere, and find the idea of skiing—going down a mountain on two boards—a sure sign of mental imbalance, it is a kind of blessing to experience the lack of sun and the cold, to remember the Son who never sets, and the winter fire of Christ, which is truly the warmth of the miserable, as it was for all humanity before the first Christmas.
This is confirmed by some words of St. Seraphim of Sarov, the Russian Orthodox saint who died in 1833. St. Seraphim spent most of his monastic life as a hermit in the Russian forests. As happens with so many saints, his holiness seemed to create a harmony with the natural world, a prelapsarian relationship. Wild animals approached his cabin, and on one occasion he was seen feeding a bear by hand. Despite being a hermit, people came to him, the “elder,” as he was known, to receive spiritual wisdom.
St. Seraphim said: “God is a fire that warms and inflames the heart… Therefore, if we feel in our heart the cold that comes from the Devil—because the Devil is cold—let us call upon the Lord. He will come to warm our heart with perfect love and the cold of him who hates good will flee before the warmth of His face.”
Aaron’s blessing—that the face of God be revealed to us to bless us—is wonderfully illustrated in these words of St. Seraphim. His face is revealed in the warmth of the Church, especially in the Eucharist, where the Real Presence dispels the winter of the world. That is why seekers are drawn to the “silent renaissance” that is happening in the West; they have had enough of the ice offered by empty ideologies and consumerist emptiness.
The heart of Hell, its epicenter, according to Dante, was ice. “The devil is cold,” says St. Seraphim, the fiery one—for that is what his name means. Sin and hatred of the Good freeze the heart; only the warmth of the face of Christ, found in prayer and the sacraments, can melt that coldness.
As this Advent season progresses, pray that the Lord “lift up his face upon you” and grant you His warmth and His peace.
About the author
Fr. Benedict Kiely is a priest of the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham. He is the founder of Nasarean.org, which helps persecuted Christians.