Meaning of expression “Christ is born in us”

Two mystics and a theologian papal retreat master can help us explain.

The German physician, poet and priest convert from Lutheranism, Johann Scheffler who adapted the name Angelus Silesius, had once said, “Though Jesus Christ were born in Bethlehem a thousand times/but not in you, then you are lost forever.” Giovanni Papini an Italian, also a convert to Catholicism, reflecting on these words of Silesius said, “On the day you feel the need to bring a bit of happiness to someone who is sad … be glad because God’s arrival is imminent … This new miracle is not impossible provided it is desired and expected.”

Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa, an Italian Capuchin priest, explains that this “interior birth” and its “signs” are “produced” by “desire and expectation”; and so with this “expectant faith … we do not need any particular ‘feelings’. As an example, he advises, “it is enough, at the moment we receive the Body and Blood of Christ, to say with simplicity, “Jesus, I receive you as your mother Mary received you; I love you with the love with which the heavenly Father loves you, that is, with the Holy Spirit.”

The theologian in Fr. Raniero reminds us that in baptism we have received the love with which the Father loves his Son. This love is the Holy Spirit, “literally the love of God, the eternal, uncreated love with which the Father loves the Son and from which every other love derives.”

Fr. Raniero exudes in joy as he recalls to us the prayer of Jesus to his Father before the crucifixion “that the love with which you have loved me may be in them” (John 17:26), and joyfully concludes, “Through grace, the same love with which the Father loves the Son is in us. What a discovery! What horizons for our prayer and contemplation! … Yes. Christianity is grace, and this is what grace is: participation in divine nature, that is, in divine love (2 Peter 1:4) … And the mystics have taught us precisely this: that by grace we have been inserted into the vortex of trinitarian life.”

This is how Fr. Cantalamessa explains the spirituality of St. Teresa of Calcutta. This spirituality is based on her personal experience of Jesus brought about in herself by the Eucharist and Mama Mary, and by her loving service for Jesus really present in the “distressing disguise of the poor.”