A Meditation on the Nativity to Prepare Us For Christmas
Advent 2023 has been a short one. With Christmas now only days away, we still have time to prepare our hearts. For our final days of preparation, consider toning down or turning off distractions to focus on the Holy Family.
The Holy Family is real. They live together now in Heaven. But once they lived here on earth. Joseph and Mary were mother and father, Jesus their Child. We all know what Joseph and Mary faced as the day of His birth approached. It's a good time to step back and spend time meditating on this.
To help us, we turn to St. Ignatius Loyola, specifically his Spiritual Exercises that have enriched and inflamed the hearts of so many over the centuries. As part of the Second Week of the Spiritual Exercises, retreatants meditate on the early life of Christ. One of these meditations is on the Nativity. The meditations can bring us into the lives of the Holy Family. Here is the text of St Ignatius:
THE SECOND CONTEMPLATION IS ON THE NATIVITY
Prayer. The usual Preparatory Prayer.
First Prelude. The first Prelude is the narrative and it will be here how Our Lady went forth from Nazareth, about nine months with child, as can be piously meditated, seated on an ass, and accompanied by Joseph and a maid, taking an ox, to go to Bethlehem to pay the tribute which Caesar imposed on all those lands.
Second Prelude. The second, a composition, seeing the place. It will be here to see with the sight of the imagination the road from Nazareth to Bethlehem; considering the length and the breadth, and whether such road is level or through valleys or over hills; likewise looking at the place or cave of the Nativity, how large, how small, how low, how high, and how it was prepared.
Third Prelude. The third will be the same, and in the same form, as in the preceding Contemplation.
First Point. The first Point is to see the persons; that is, to see Our Lady and Joseph and the maid, and, after His Birth, the Child Jesus, I making myself a poor creature and a wretch of an unworthy slave, looking at them and serving them in their needs, with all possible respect and reverence, as if I found myself present; and then to reflect on myself in order to draw some profit.
Second Point. The second, to look, mark and contemplate what they are saying, and, reflecting on myself, to draw some profit.
Third Point. The third, to look and consider what they are doing, as going a journey and laboring, that the Lord may be born in the greatest poverty; and as a termination of so many labors–of hunger, of thirst, of heat and of cold, of injuries and affronts–that He may die on the Cross; and all this for me: then reflecting, to draw some spiritual profit.
Colloquy. I will finish with a Colloquy as in the preceding Contemplation, and with an Our Father.
For one last time during Advent 2023, we conclude with the beautiful, traditional Advent aspiration:
Divine Infant of Bethlehem
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