O Christ!

O beautiful divine Child, who said: Life begins and ends with childhood... and the years that pass between the two childhoods are a parenthetical clause on the page of life... a clause intruding upon childhood.

O Christ!

On this night, the night of your birth, all creation trembles, and the ages kneel at your feet, begging forgiveness, repenting of the sins they have committed... Everything in these universes shakes with jubilation at your coming and dances the great mystic dance in rapture over you, over your greatness and adoration of you... The earth grows drunk with the drunkenness of its faith, while you pour wine into its cups whenever it turns toward your eyes...

Beauty and majesty and perfection rise in your land as a divine pyramid, on whose summit you stand to address the generations and recite the message of the Nativity... The days call out to one another to merge into your greatest, immortal day... The four winds fall still... In your train walk the carver and the painter and the builder and the poet and the philosopher and the singer, bearing your banner and blowing the trumpets, leading the creatures up to the summits.

Everything on earth and in heaven tonight is a flame kindled and smoke gathering about your glory... O greatest of Kings!

This night, the night of your birth... the night of the great joy, the abounding good, the abiding peace... the night of truth and glory... the night of eternity... the night of nights, in which Kawthar flows and the essence shines forth... the night of gentleness and meekness and nobility and giving and modesty and serenity and purity and love and forbearance and right and goodness and pardon and faith!...

O Christ!

Every land where your flowers and your roses do not grow is a desert,

and every night blind to you is a night whose star is sightless.

And the sinning Pharisees and the hypocritical publicans are still, on this earth you perfumed with your gospels and your parables, corrupting and destroying, devouring the houses of widows, swallowing camels, and shedding innocent blood... The children of vipers still spew their poisons, burn the trees planted by the high ideals, cut the strings of your silver, enchanting lyre, and cast victim upon victim into the bellies of the valleys, on the shores of the seas, and on the slopes of the mountains... So stretch over them, O Almighty, Generous, Merciful One, the right hand of your dominion, above which there is no dominion; loose upon them from your eyes the blue rays, the rays of God; cast out their devils, cleanse them, and give them rest — and give the weary and heavy-laden rest from their evils... Have compassion on this earth, pulled this way and that by good and evil, contested by life and death, and lift it with your hand — the hand of mercy — O Most Merciful of the merciful, to that summit which you have prepared for the righteous.