Love as we have been loved.

The world associates Christmas with children, and not just because of the birth of the baby Jesus. Maybe one reason we associate Christmas with children is that children are quick to identify what they want and ask for it -- sometimes loudly and insistently! And children are just as quick to show their joy when they get what they need and their dismay when they don't get what they asked for specially.

Both the world and the church associate Christmas with the poor and the outcast -- and not just because the story tells us of the travelling family forced to bed down in a stable. People who are poor and outcast openly display their needs -- they haven't the means to hide them. We can tell what they need, because we see so clearly what they don't have.

The truth is that all of us have things we want desperately, though we may conceal our deepest desires under gruff exteriors or the mask of self-sufficiency. We all have things we need, but are so afraid to show our neediness, to show the ways we feel lonely or left out -- outcast. Many of us have lived with this self- sufficient face so long that we can't even recognize our own needs, or learn to ask, as children do, for what we want.

Christmas is a story about all of us receiving that which we most want and need: love -- deep, strong, unconditional love. The gift at Christmas isn't just the gift of a baby to Mary and Joseph, the shepherds and the Wise Men. It isn't just a story about Joseph and Mary being entrusted by God with the awesome responsibility of caring for God's son. The Christmas story is about how God so loved -- and loves -- us that he asks us to be partners in loving the world.

God asks us, like Joseph and Mary, to learn to hear and understand the cries of infants and children, of people in need. We are called to listen and learn to understand the unspoken cries of all who need to be cared for: children, families, older people, people who are sick and poor and needy -- and each other.

And once we listen and understand, learn to distinguish among the cries; we are called to respond in love. The Gospel proclaims that "The Word became flesh and lived among us." Mary and Joseph made a loving home for the Word, for Jesus. Will we? Will we invite the person of Jesus into our lives? Will we care for that presence, listen to him crying, love him as our brother? Jesus is in our world now, today, and will be tomorrow, and in the New Year and beyond.

Jesus is with us even in the middle of the dry season or winter, when Christmas day seems forever away. And you can hear him: He will be in the laughter and cries of children; he will be in the cries of families who have been broken apart by poverty and despair and violence; he will be in the cries of the elderly who are alone and frightened; he will be in our own cries of pain; he will be in the laughter of people coming together in love. We can hear him in in what we see on our news each day showing us where people are broken at home and faraway and we can hear him in the love shown as these broken people pick up their lives and live them to the fullest.

The Word became flesh and lives among us. Emmanuel – God with us. May each day be Christmas, and may we tell the story by our lives each day: the story of how we cared for the presence of Christ entrusted to us, by caring for each other and for ourselves, as we listen to the cries and laughter, and love as we have been loved. May Christmas not be identified only with the children, or the poor, or the outcast, but with all of us, as we risk ourselves to love and be loved, even as God does in this blessed Son, born to bring us love in the world this day and always.