Tuesday, December 26, 2006

Phe-No-Me-Nal

Or perhaps just, "wow". Mike Aquilina hit a real home run (or insert-your-favorite-metaphor-here) with his post called "The Senses of Christmas". If you haven't read it, read it. If you have read it, read it again. Me, I think it may well become mandatory personal reading for the Christmas season.

And Christmas is full of that glory. The Gloria, the song of Christmas, comes to us from the Christmas Eve mass of the ancient Church. The angels sang it when they announced Christ’s birth: Glory to God in the highest! What was so glorious? This Jesus was born to a poor working family in a drafty stable filled with smelly animals. And that is precisely what was so glorious.
...
The Christmas story is the story of how the flesh became holy, the body was sanctified, and simple earthly joys became hymns of praise to God. Thus Christmas is a feast for the eyes, the ears, and all the senses. We love to hear the story over and over, and we always will love it so long as a scrap of humanity remains in us.

And those aren't even the highlights...