This Christmas season I felt the urge to binge on feel-good Hallmark Christmas style T.V. Shows. I experienced a diminishing sense of pleasure at one romance after another, accompanied by starry-eyed children and some amazing “coincidences”

“Go back to your heart, and from there to God. You’re going back, you see, from the nearest possible place, if you have gone back to your heart.” (St. Augustine sermon #331)

Christmas is a time of reconciliation and return, of re-connecting with far-flung family members and friends. St Augustine is urging us to reconnect with our own hearts as well as with our other friends. Augustine lived before the appearance of Christmas trees, or even the display of a “creche”. Perhaps it was easier for him to say “Return to your heart”, as there were fewer distractions like binge-worthy T.V. Shows.

Nevertheless, when I read Augustine’s words they resound in my mind with the words of Jesus: “The coming of the Kingdom of Hod is not something that can be observed, nor will people say, ‘Here it is”, or “There it is,’ because the Kingdom of God is within you.” (Luke 17:20).

At Christmas the Kingdom of God becomes the focus of Christians as we witness again the arrival of God as man in the baby Jesus. For Mary he was literally inside her, next to her heart for nine months before Bethlehem. Jesus’ birth shows us how very close God is to all those who believe. It’s a low bar for the Holy Spirit of God to take us from imagining holding the infant Jesus , to fnding the risen Christ in our hearts. He Holy Spirit works to make that connection for us so that we may really “/Go back to our hearts” and find God there.

It would be thirty years before others would discover the Kingdom living within them when they found and followed Jesus, but we have the benefit of telescoping time, and at Christmas we can enter into the extraordinary gift with gentleness and even silence as we “Go back to our hearts”

I love the lights and the trees and the bows and the wassail and the carols and the reuniting, but the Saint says there is something more, just as Jesus directed us to where to find Him. We all need the “more”, for it brings us into the very family of our God, to share His life with us, a life without end, available to every believer who goes back to his or her own heart.

Love in Him,

Prue