Christ the Winter Fire – The Catholic Thing

“O God be gracious and bless us and let Your face shed its light upon us.” So begins Psalm 68, often said in the Daily Office, or Breviary, at the start of the day. In St. John’s Gospel, Philip says to Jesus, “show us the Father and that will be enough for us.” Jesus responds, “Philip, to have seen Me is to have seen the Father.” The light shining from the face of Christ is the light of the Father. The blessing of seeing the face of Christ is the gift we will soon celebrate at Christmas: God has become man, and we can look upon Him.

This is why we can revere holy images, and in a special way icons, because of the Incarnation. We do not worship the images, but they become a window, or portal, in which we can enter into the mystery of the divine and have, in a very real sense, an encounter with the One portrayed. A holy icon of the face of Christ, for example, is a way that we can gaze into the sacred humanity and divinity of the Lord, and feel the blessing, warmth, and light of His face.

In the priestly blessing of Aaron in the Old Testament, in the Book of Numbers, he prays that the “Lord make His face to shine upon you … the Lord lift up His countenance upon you and give you His peace.”

The peace of Christ, which St. Paul tells us is beyond all human understanding, comes from the shining countenance of the Lord. It is a warming presence, driving away the sadness of weariness and despondency.

Apart from the necessity of cultivating gratitude for the wonderous gift of the Word made flesh, Advent is a time to drive out that enervating weariness, both physical and spiritual, and the easy despondency that comes from both forgetfulness of what Christmas really means and the slavery of being captured and captivated by the bad news that surrounds us.

Thomas of Celano, the earliest biographer of St. Francis of Assisi, who is usually credited with the invention of the Christmas creche, complete with Ox and Ass, wrote that one of the reasons that St. Francis decided to create the Manger scene was because the “love of the world for Christ had grown cold.”

The creation of that scene of the birth of Christ, so often today rather saccharine and unrealistic, in the 13th century, when perhaps hardened hearts might be melted more easily than those made cynical by loveless and unlovely secularism, allowed, according to legend, some even to see the Baby Jesus moving in the crib.

Chesterton, that man who loved Christmas more even than Dickens, often wrote of the contrast between the warmth and comfort of the fire within the house, the “cosiness,” he called it, and the rain, cold, and snow outside. Christ, he said, “is not merely a summer sun of the prosperous but a winter fire for the unfortunate.” To lack the warmth of Christ is to be more than unfortunate. The cold that ensues freezes both body and soul.

Paradoxically, especially for those who dislike the winter in the western hemisphere, and who find the idea of skiing, going down a mountain on two sticks, a sure sign of mental imbalance, it is something of a blessing to experience the lack of sun and the cold, in order to be reminded of the Son who never sets, and the winter fire of Christ who is truly the warmth of the unfortunate, as was all of 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 with so many of the saints, his holiness seemed to create a harmony with the natural world, a prelapsarian relationship. Wild animals would come to his hut, and he was even seen once feeding a bear by hand. Despite being a hermit, people would come to him, the “elder,” as he was known, to receive spiritual wisdom.

St. Seraphim said: “God is a fire that warms the heart…Hence if we feel in our hearts the cold which comes from the Devil – for the Devil is cold – let us call on the Lord. He will come to warm our hearts with perfect love and the cold of him who hates the good will flee before the heat of His countenance.”

Aaron’s blessing, that God’s countenance may be revealed to us, in order to bless us, is beautifully illustrated by these words of St. Seraphim. His countenance is revealed in the warmth of the Church, most especially in the Eucharist, where the Real Presence drives away worldly winter. This is why seekers are being drawn, in the ‘quiet revival’ that is happening across the West; they have had enough of the coldness offered by empty ideologies and consumerist vacuity.

The heart of Hell, its very 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 the hating of the Good freeze the heart; only the warmth of the face of Christ, encountered in prayer and the sacraments, can thaw that coldness.

As this Advent time progresses, pray that the Lord will “lift His countenance upon you,” and give you His warmth and His peace.