It was going to be a personal retreat.

But it didn't happen.

There were too many wise men and women, too many shepherds. The angel song was loud and competing with commercial advertising, and the stable door was blocked with Christmas trees and tinsel.

Entry to a place of peace came on Boxing Day.

Was your Christmas also like that?

Then, like me, you are now reflecting on all that noise and messiness and finding with surprise that Jesus was being born in every part of it.

I should know by now that He doesn't conform to our rules.

Here we were, trying to find time to visit the stable, when He was out there in the streets, the shops, hospitals, pubs, homes and churches.

He travelled in planes. He visited prisons.

He was everywhere.

Looking back, I recognise the times my old heart melted with his newborn touch.

So now, I will list a few experiences and suggest you do the same.

You too, will have encountered him in unexpected places, so here are the pre-Christmas memories that I hold and treasure.

• Three primary schools sing waiata and do haka with beautiful enthusiasm. Some children are Maori, some Pakeha or Indian, Asian, Amercian. Their performance was professional. I was so pleased to see several politicians in the audience.
• A man on the street begs for money to take his dog to the vet. I don't think he has a dog, but he knows that passers-by are more sympathetic to dogs than to beggars. We talk for a while and I hear Jesus saying "The son of man has no place to lay his head."
• A teenager is playing her violin in the train station. She is playing carols. A mother with a child of about three years of age, has stopped to listen. The little boy is dancing to the music. I think, Did Jesus dance? Well, he does now.
• Two women bring lovely cloth placemats they have made. On each mat, there is the handprint of one of their children. Such treasure! The children will grow, but the mats will always portray them as I knewthem. I think of Jesus' hands at various stages, small, exploring his surroundings, healing others, breaking bread, and being wounded by nails.

Before Christmas, I needed to sort papers, including lots of letters from schoolchildren. One from a girl in California, asked all the usual questions.

• What is your favourite colour?
• What is your favourite food?
• The last question was the most interesting. Are you still alive?

That last question connected me to Jesus. Of course He is still alive.

The birth of the Christ child is in all of us.

We may not be aware of it but there will be times when we say, "Where did that cone from?" or
"Why do I feel this way?

It is then that we realise that Christmas is not a historical view of a holy child born in an animal shelter.

The birth is here and now, and we are all stables.

• Joy Cowley is a wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and retreat facilitator. Joy Cowley is a wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and retreat facilitator.

The date was chosen from the very beginning for two reasons: it falls nine months before we celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, and it conforms to an ancient belief that God became incarnate during the spring equinox.

However, our liturgical texts and prayers for this feast tend to put more emphasis on the Virgin Mary's free-will consent (her fiat) to bear the saviour of the world than on the fact that this is the moment God begins to take flesh in her womb.

We could call this the feast of Jesus' conception.

But Danilo Sartor, a priest of the Servites of Mary who taught liturgy for many years in Rome, says it would be better to change it to the "Feast of the Incarnation".

In his words, this would best "get to the heart of the mystery that is being celebrated".

A mystery and a scandal

More than a mystery, the incarnation is a scandal to many.

God who becomes a human being?

The consequences of that threaten our safe and tidy "god in a box" mentality that we are so often tempted to embrace and find comfort in.

It's a God who is detached from the messiness of our world.

He (always "He") is encountered in ritualised prayer formulas, in church buildings (but only those that "look" like churches), in tabernacles or gold monstrances... God who becomes flesh like us?

This is the Jesus that scandalised many in the early Church (and led to schisms) and scandalises many today.

"One and the same person — this must be said over and over again — is truly the Son of God and truly the Son of humankind," wrote Saint Leo the Great in the 5th century.

"(Jesus) is God in the virtue of the fact that in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

"He is human in virtue of the fact that the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us."

The incarnation is at the very core of what we believe as followers of Jesus the Christ.

Believing in a God who becomes part of God's own creation — and, even more, the implications of that — can seem not to be other-worldly and "sacral" enough for us.

We prefer to skip over the entire earthly (fleshly) life of Christ in our creedal statements.

The "great comma"

As Richard Rohr likes to point out,"Have you ever noticed the huge leap the creed makes between 'born of the Virgin Mary' and 'suffered under Pontius Pilate'?"

This leap is marked by the "great comma", which he says should lead us to ask come serious questions: "Did all the things Jesus said and did in those years not count for much?

"Were they nothing to 'believe' in?

"Was it only his birth and death that mattered?

"Does the gap in some way explain Christianity's often dismal record of imitating Jesus' actual life and teaching?"

It seems to me that Pope Francis does not fall into this trap.

And, ironically, it's why some Catholics are cool towards him and his evangelical, incarnate way of evangelising and renewing the Church.

"The joy of the gospel fills the hearts and lives of all who encounter Jesus.

"Those who accept his offer of salvation are set free from sin, sorrow, inner emptiness and loneliness.

"With Christ joy is constantly born anew."

These are the words that begin Evangelii gaudium, the apostolic exhortation Francis published in 2013 shortly after his election to the papacy.

"In this exhortation, I wish to encourage the Christian faithful to embark upon a new chapter of evangelisation marked by this joy, while pointing out new paths for the Church's journey in years to come," he continues in this document.

It remains the most important text he's issued during his ten years as pope.

"Realities are greater than ideas"

But the type of evangelisation Francis is talking about — and that which he has modelled throughout his pontificate — has nothing to do with proselytisation (i.e. trying any means to force, scare or trick people into becoming part of a particular group or ideology).

And it has even less to do with presenting Christian faith as something other-worldly, pie-in-the-sky or detached from human reality.

This is one of the reasons the 86-year-old pope continues to upset those Catholics who see their religion more as a form of private piety and devotion (even if they fulfil that in the presence of others on Sundays) than a living, incarnate faith that poses communal, societal and ethical demands and obligations.

Francis would say it is a faith that has to do with finding God and responding to God within the messy realities of our lives and our world, not in some lofty and idealised realm that is outside of such realities.

"Realities are greater than ideas," he says in Evangelii gaudium.

"This principle has to do with incarnation of the word and its being put into practice... The principle of reality, of a word already made flesh and constantly striving to take flesh anew, is essential to evangelisation," he continues.

And here's the essence of the type of incarnate reality he's talking about:

It helps us to see that the Church's history is a history of salvation, to be mindful of those saints who inculturated the Gospel in the life of our peoples and to reap the fruits of the Church's rich bimillennial tradition without pretending to come up with a system of thought detached from this treasury as if we wanted to reinvent the Gospel.

At the same time, this principle impels us to put the word into practice, to perform works of justice and charity which make that word fruitful.

Not to put the word into practice, not to make it reality, is to build on sand, to remain in the realm of pure ideas and to end up in a lifeless and unfruitful self-centredness and gnosticism (EG, 233).

A pope who never speaks of Jesus?

It is always curious to hear people accuse Francis of not speaking enough about Jesus, but focusing more on social issues like poverty, war, the environment and so forth.

It is, in fact, through these realities that he is challenging us to the "put the word into practice" and make it "fruitful".

He points out that scripture makes it clear that there is an "inseparable bond between our acceptance of the message of salvation and genuine fraternal love".

But the consequences are evidently unclear to those who accuse the pope of not talking enough about Jesus.

"God's word teaches that our brothers and sisters are the prolongation of the incarnation for each of us: 'As you did it to one of these, the least of my brethren, you did it to me' (Mt 25:40)," he point out in his exhortation (EG, 179).

The pope is showing, by example, that the Christian faith has social consequences.

But it is ludicrous and an outright lie to say he does not preach or talk enough about Jesus.

Francis is actually extremely devoted to prayer, even in a traditional way; but he correctly sees that devotion is only one part of the equation for a Christian life.

"More than just simple doctrinal and moral transmission"

"The Church urgently needs the deep breath of prayer, and to my great joy groups devoted to prayer and intercession, the prayerful reading of God's word and the perpetual adoration of the Eucharist are growing at every level of ecclesial life," he says further on in Evangelii gaudium.

"Even so, 'we must reject the temptation to offer a privatised and individualistic spirituality which ill accords with the demands of charity, to say nothing of the implications of the incarnation'," he adds, quoting none other than John Paul II! (EG 262).

"Evangelisation is more than just simple doctrinal and moral transmission.

It is, first and foremost, witness - one cannot evangelise without witness - witness of the personal encounter with Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Word in which salvation is fulfilled," Francis said at his most recent Wednesday general audience.

He upheld Evangelii nuntiandi — the apostolic exhortation Paul VI issued back in 1975 — as "the magna carta of evangelisation in the contemporary world", saying it is as topical as if it had been written yesterday.

Francis then paraphrased the Second Vatican Council and said the Church, too, "has a constant need of being evangelised; she needs to read the Gospel, to pray and to feel the force of the Spirit changing her heart".

And that is all done in the messy reality of our world here and now.

In dialogue with the contemporary world

"A Church that evangelises herself in order to evangelise is a Church that, guided by the Holy Spirit, is required to walk a demanding path, a path of conversion and renewal," the Jesuit pope continued.

"This also entails the ability to change the ways of understanding and living its evangelising presence in history, avoiding taking refuge in the protected zones of the logic of 'it has always been done this way'... the refuges that cause the Church to sicken," he added.

"The Church must go forward, she must grow continually... must be a Church that dialogically encounters the contemporary world, that weaves fraternal relationships, that generates spaces of encounter, implementing good practices of hospitality, of welcome, of recognition and integration of the other and of otherness, and that cares for the common home that is creation," he said.

"That is, a Church... that dialogues with the contemporary world, but that encounters the Lord every day, and dialogues with the Lord, and allows the Holy Spirit, the agent of evangelisation, to enter," he said.

Pope Francis believes it is a Church that incarnates the Word — the person and message of Jesus Christ — in today's realities, not in "the realm of pure ideas" of how we'd like things to be.

Evidently, that unsettles some folks.

• Robert Mickens is LCI Editor in Chief.
• First published in La-Croix International. Republished with permission.

The failure rate is too high.

The only resolution I kept, was giving up smoking in 1976, and that was more about health than the dare.

These days, I'm aware that our measurements of time are our way of managing incarnation on earth. We place a grid over eternity.

If we lived on a much bigger planet that had four days of light, four days of darkness, and different seasons, we would change our time grid to suit.

What is still interesting about our tradition of making promises at the beginning of our year, is our motive for doing it.

Why do we feel this urge to better ourselves?

The growth imperative is all around us. We live in an expanding universe. All living things strive to grow, then die and decay to become new life.

There is no evidence to suggest that plants and animals question who they are. For them, growth seems all about nutrition, reproduction and the protection of territory.

We too have those instincts but there is something else, a restlessness that lies in a desire for inner growth.

Animals don't need religion.

So what makes us so different?

I call this ‘The Breath of God", going back to the story of Adam, and Gd breathing life into clay.

One of the Desert Fathers had another description. He said, "Wr are part animal and part angel."

I can relate to that too, and I look back at all the times I saw angel self and animal self as separate.

Sometimes, they were at war.

How many of my New Year resolutions were attempts to shut my animal self in a cupboard?

It began in childhood: I will not steal biscuits. I will not swear. I will be kind to my sisters. I will not tell lies.

Now I l know that the two belong together.

The breath of God - or angel self - wants to be human.

Through incarnation, it can grow.

The animal self needs the angel self to bring illumination to its darkness.

They do come together but union it takes time filled with life experience.

The words we put to this process of spiritual growth, are ours, and the metaphors vary. We cannot say what God is but we can say what God is like.

For me, a beautiful symbol of the angel/animal connection is the Light of the Wold born in an animal shelter.

If spiritual growth is our imperative, what is wrong with the New Year resolution?

It is only once a year. And it is usually guilt-based.

Growth is continuous and begins with self-acceptance. We are who we are meant to be, perhaps not so much human beings, as human becomings.

Our faith means that every day our angel and animal are gently embracing and working together.

God's breath is in my clay, and the clay of everyone I meet.

Let us live in gratitude.

• Joy Cowley is a wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and retreat facilitator.

Did he have to learn his craft of carpentry? Did he have to learn table manners?

There are all kinds of questions one can ask about the way Jesus' divine and human natures related in his earthly life, and we can't know the answers to all of them.

Pope Benedict wrote "It is also true that his wisdom grows. As a human being, he does not live in some abstract omniscience, but he is rooted in a concrete history, a place and a time, in the different phases of human life, and this is what gives concrete shape to his knowledge." Read more

The year will also deliver hard work. Living in this world creates layers of busyness, planning, anxieties, small divisions that fracture our sense of wholeness. Yet when we pause long enough to go back to the sweet calm of the manger, we connect again with that newness. It echoes a line from Gerard Manley Hopkins: "…there lives the dearest freshness deep down things…"

What we encounter with Jesus in the Nativity, is our own birth, a pure soul coming into incarnation. What we feel is our own God-given state of grace.

I can't remember the name of the church father who described humanity as "part angel and part animal." That's a good metaphor. We immediately recognize in ourselves, the tools for survival, those animal me-first instincts that can block our spiritual path if we don't work with them and learn from them.

We can put a lot of prayer into the "sins" of the ego. That is not wrong, but our faith will lack balance if we don't also acknowledge the angel, that spark of God in us. Deep down, under the surface struggle, we all live in astounding grace.

Our struggles can be regarded as lessons in "life school." Sometimes the lessons are hard and we need to sit an exam more than once, but that core of grace will always move us forward. We go from narrow thinking in which we see ourselves as separate and alienated in a hostile world, to spacious thinking where we know the interconnectedness of everything - God manifest in all of creation.

This growth process is succinctly described by an anonymous 15th century monk: "Find thyself: tis half the path to God. Then lose thyself and the rest of the way is trod."

Losing oneself comes when we let go of dualistic thinking and see God in all things. There are no enemies, simply beautiful souls in various stages of growth in life school. The pilgrim who comes to this way of seeing, may appear to be full of loving kindness. That's because another's pain is his pain, another's celebration, his celebration, another's struggle her struggle. This is something beyond compassion. It is the true understanding of chessed, the Hebrew word for loving kindness.

We glimpse some of this quality in saints like Mother Teresa. We see it in its fullness in our Lord Jesus Christ who bore the pain of the world because he chose not to be separate from us.

That brings us back to Christmas and New Year. During the coming year, we will reflect on Jesus's death and resurrection, on his teachings, his miracles. But by far the greatest miracle is his birth. How could he choose to come into incarnation for us? That is truly astounding grace.

• Joy Cowley is a wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and retreat facilitator.

There is the manger with Mary kneeling by the infant Jesus with Joseph by her side. Often there are shepherds and a few sheep as well as some angels hovering in the sky.

When St. Francis of Assisi created this image in the 1200s, he did it to remind people that this holy day is about worshiping God rather than gift giving.

But this visual image did far more than that. For the people of his time it spoke to the felt sense of what this mystery was about, and it became a permanent part of our religious imagination.

Certainly this purpose is still relevant today but I'm afraid for many this Nativity scene is what the Incarnation is all about. Such a depiction of Incarnation may be helpful to teach young children about this mystery; however, the power of this mystery is so much more.

The world needs us to witness to this profound mystery more than ever. Listen to the rhetoric of many of the politicians and those running for president.

We are at war with radical Islam. We need to eradicate the cancer of IS/ISIL. Build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico to keep migrants out. Stop the resettlement process of Syrian refugees. Issue identity cards for Muslim U.S. citizens. Maybe let Christian Syrians into our country. We've got to be tough. Bomb them. People should have guns to protect themselves.

Such beliefs are filling the airwaves. Their energy is destructive and feeds our fears. It preys on our "differences." It asserts that for us to be secure we need to keep others separate from us.

This toxic atmosphere belies our belief in the Incarnation, which reveals that we are all one.

Our faith will fail us if we do not allow this mystery to penetrate our hearts in ways that call forth from us a more mature faith. Continue reading

• Nancy Sylvester, IHM, is founder and director of the Institute for Communal Contemplation and Dialogue. The article first appeared in Global Sisters Report.