st 1 ​ Advent Meditation, Yr. B Rev. Fr. Rufus Kenny ​ th November 29 2020​ ​ The Christmas Creche, the Nativity or Manger scene, will soon celebrate its eight hundredth anniversary. This beloved Catholic tradition traces its origins back to St. Francis of Assisi in the year 1223. It may be hard to believe but in Assisi Italy, during St. Francis’s day, Catholics were dealing with spiritual problems not so unlike our own. St. Francis saw how the Christmas season was quickly losing its sense of sacred and becoming secularized. From his saintly point of view, it seemed as though the people of his day had replaced the newborn king’s birth with a shallow commercialism. People were more concerned with buying and giving gifts than worshipping God. St. Francis desired to remind people of the true meaning of Christmas: The adoration of Christ. Long before cars would bear those popular bumper stickers, that remind people to “Keep Christ in Christmas,” St. Francis provided his town with an advertisement that would spread around the entire world, namely the first Christmas Creche. His goal was to lift people’s minds and hearts from their ordinary wordily ways of thinking and desiring, and pull them up into a heavenly space—One that is filled with grace and conversion. ​ ​ His hope was to draw people back to God by reminding them that this story concerning the child Jesus is not a dead fact of history but a living reality, not something locked in the past but something alive and made present mystically through the grace of the sacraments. Before He left the earth and ascended into heaven, Christ said to us, “Behold I am with you always even until the end of the age.” Christ truly is with us, in fact, He has been exposed before us in the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar. Not only is Christ personally present in the monstrance, but the whole mystery of His earthly life is present as well, including the first time He was revealed to the world at His nativity. All of us are afforded the opportunity to bow down and worship the New 1 st 1 ​ Advent Meditation, Yr. B Rev. Fr. Rufus Kenny ​ th November 29 2020​ ​ Born King, just as those who encountered Him on that first Christmas did when they came and adored Him. Although we cannot physically transport back two-thousand years to Bethlehem, we can, mystically through the power of grace, be spiritually made present to Him at that very moment when angels, men, and beasts gazed upon Him in awe-filled wonder. For the Blessed Sacrament is our window into the original Christmas Creche, and likewise, we can gaze upon Him in awe-filled wonder. During this four-part Advent meditation, we will reflect together upon the different elements present in St. Francis of Assisi’s Creche. Today we will reflect upon the non-human elements; next week we will consider the shepherds and the kings; the third week we will contemplate St. Joseph and the Blessed Virgin Mary; the final week we will meditate upon the Child Jesus. The aim of these Advent meditations is simple, to increase our love and gratitude for Jesus, so our hearts may be ready to greet Him with the loving embrace He deserves and desires from each one of us. As I already mentioned, this first meditation focuses uniquely on the non-human elements present at Our Lord’s birth. In theological terms, we may say we are looking at the other creatures present within creation. When the Church speaks on creation, she speaks of a hierarchy of being—man is only one of many creatures. ​ ​ Looking briefly at this hierarchy of being, we will see that each kind of creature is represented at Christ’s birth. At the top of this hierarchy, we find the Creator, the uncreated, supreme, infinite spiritual being, who is the origin of all that exists. Below Him are purely spiritual creatures, those beings that revelation lists as the nine choirs of angels. Below the angels is mankind, who is both spiritual and material. After us, there are animate material creatures, animals and plants, these 2 st 1 ​ Advent Meditation, Yr. B Rev. Fr. Rufus Kenny ​ th November 29 2020​ ​ creatures are alive but they do not have a spirit or a soul. The hierarchy concludes with inanimate creatures, those we call minerals, things that exist but have no material or spiritual life. All that exists is contained within one of these five categories. Let us look first at minerals: “In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth.” (Genesis 1:1) This is the first line of the Bible, this was the first action of God. When God put everything into motion, following what science calls The Big Bang, He knew when creation would be ready to welcome Him upon His arrival. At His nativity, the two mineral creatures that greeted Him were the famous star and the infamous cave. Regarding the star, the Gospel of Matthew tells us, “…They set out [the Magi]; and there, ahead of them, went the star that they had seen at its rising until it stopped over the place where the child was.” (Matt 2:9) God set up the universe in such a way that the stars of heaven became a kind of celestial GPS, a divine Waze, a moving map pointing out the way to find their ​ ​ Creator. We see that the heavens played their spectacular part in serving their Maker, but the earth had its humble role as well. The Gospel of Luke tells us that “… she gave birth to her first-born son and wrapped Him in swaddling clothes, and laid Him in a manger because there was no place for them in the inn.” (Luke 2:7) I was privileged with the opportunity to visit Bethlehem during a Holy Land Pilgrimage five years ago. I saw the caves that were used to house the livestock during that time. Our Lord, Our Lady and St. Joseph were literally sheltered by the earth. How true were the words of St. John, “He was in the world, and the world was made through Him, yet the world knew Him not. He came to His own home, and His own people received Him not.” (John 1:10-11) Even though the world did 3 st 1 ​ Advent Meditation, Yr. B Rev. Fr. Rufus Kenny ​ th November 29 2020​ ​ not know Him or receive Him, the earth did, and that first night the earth cared for its creator by sheltering Him at His birth. After the heavens and the earth were formed God said, “Let the earth put forth vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind upon the earth.” (Genesis 1:11) The only mention we have of a plant at Christ’s nativity is indirect. According to biblical commentators, the cave in which he slept that first night would have housed oxen, and therefore the food in the manger would have been straw. We also know what kind of straw it was because of the name of the village. In Hebrew, Bethlehem means “House of Bread.” It was so named because the land was known for its grain production. The oxen worked in that area because they were essential to the production of this commodity, for they were the ones responsible for the ploughing, the threshing, and the hauling of grain. Imagine the glory of this plant! The sacrificed wheat became Our Savior’s first bed. This plant honored God the night of His birth and God chose to honor it the night before His death. God not only assumed human nature at His Incarnation, He assumes the form of bread and He remains present to us here in the Holy Eucharist until the end of time—Even a blade of grass is ​ ​ transformed by the Incarnation. Then God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds: cattle and creeping things and beasts of the earth ....” (Genesis 1:24) Like the wheat plant, we likewise have no explicit description of what animals were present at the manger. However, we do have an Old Testament prophecy from Isaiah revealing a couple of the animals. “The ox knows its owner and the ass its master’s crib; but Israel does not know me, my people do not understand.” (Isaiah 1:3) We have 4 st 1 ​ Advent Meditation, Yr. B Rev. Fr. Rufus Kenny ​ th November 29 2020​ ​ already explained why the oxen were present at the manger, while the donkey seems to have been there as a means of transportation for Our Lady. At nine-months pregnant, Our Lady could not have been expected to walk ninety-eight miles from Nazareth to Bethlehem. A voyage that would have taken no less than 32 hours (Hence why artists portray her riding a donkey.) According to the Old Law, an ox was a clean animal, and the ass was an unclean animal. Mosaic Law even stated, “Thou shalt not plough with an ox and an ass yoked together.” The early Church Fathers believed these two beasts of burden symbolically represented the Jews and the Gentiles. The Jew who was considered ritually clean symbolized by the ox, and the Gentiles who were seen as unclean symbolized by the ass. Through these two animals, both the Jews and the Gentiles were represented at Christ’s birth. The final two animals that are also depicted in most Creche scenes are sheep and camels.