In the summer of 1967, a very young Father Joseph Ratzinger delivered a series of lectures at Tubingen University in Germany. The following year those lectures were published under the title Introduction to Christianity.The title is somewhat misleading. Even though the lectures dealt with the articles of the Apostles Creed, the basics of our faith, the book is what we would expect from one as brilliant as the now-Pope Benedict XVI. It takes more than a little time to plumb the depths of those lectures, but it is well worth the effort.

In the summer of 1967, a very young Father Joseph Ratzinger delivered a series of lectures at Tubingen University in Germany. The following year those lectures were published under the title Introduction to Christianity.The title is somewhat misleading. Even though the lectures dealt with the articles of the Apostles Creed, the basics of our faith, the book is what we would expect from one as brilliant as the now-Pope Benedict XVI. It takes more than a little time to plumb the depths of those lectures, but it is well worth the effort.

Early on in the book, Father Ratzinger examines the difficulties involved for anyone in making an act of faith in today’s world. When the believer says “Credo” — “I believe” — and really means it, he asserts the reality of that which is essentially invisible, intangible, beyond his immediate grasp as an earthly being. This is no small feat because human beings are, in the words of Father Ratzinger, “marked off by the range of what [they] can see and grasp.”

But “Credo” signifies a new and enlarged view of reality itself. Again, in the words of the author: “It signifies the deliberate view that what cannot be seen, what can in no wise move into the field of vision, is not unreal; that on the contrary what cannot be seen in fact represents true reality, the element that supports and makes possible all the rest of reality.” Belief or faith is, then, quite a leap — a leap out of the tangible world. Belief or faith always has something of a risk about it.

Belief in God is a profound “yes” to the One who is essentially beyond and totally other than all created reality. God is the eternally mysterious One. To entrust ourselves to this God is at the very least a great adventure for any human being. As Christians, however, our faith is not in a God who is only the totally mysterious Other. Christian faith affirms nothing less than the entry of this God into the particularities of our human history. We Christians believe that, at a specific moment in time on a specific strip of land at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea, God took flesh and was born into our world from the womb of a specific young woman named Mary. We proclaim that this Jesus of Nazareth, God-made man, died on a specific day in human history and rose from the dead three days later. We believe with St. John that God, beyond our grasp from all eternity, has now shown himself to us. We have seen him. We have heard him speak. We have touched him (cf. 1 Jn 1:1-3). In these and in all the specifics of the human history of Jesus we claim to find the salvation of the entire world.

Father Ratzinger wonders whether it might not be even more difficult to believe in this kind of God, a God who has come so close to us that we can kill him. And yet this is precisely what all of Christianity celebrates at Christmas: the unfathomable God has stooped to enter our sinful world in the flesh of a baby, in an act so seemingly insignificant that it should not even cause us to notice.

When we look upon the Christmas crèches in our homes and in our churches, our faith compels us to see there no one less than God himself. Therein is the real challenge to faith, to believe that God could and did so “limit” himself as to become one of us; that God in the flesh could and would die and then rise from the dead. This truth, this fact, almost unbelievable, in all its simplicity and straightforwardness is the reason for our faith.

My Christmas prayer for all believers in the Diocese of Colorado Springs is that we — each of us — will discover anew the immense and awesome beauty of this feast and come to know again the love of God for each of us. It is a love so great that the God who is beyond all comprehension has sent His only-begotten Son to live, die and rise for us.

A blessed Christmas to all!