This is Christmas!

-source-

Angels surround the Word made flesh.

This is the perfect creche.   It is the focus, the center of the celebration - the Word made Flesh and dwells among us.  I wish our churches looked like this, I wish Mass was celebrated like this.

This is why I began to paint icons years ago, just when most of the images were removed from churches, and many of the altars desacralized.  I was trying to fill a hole ... I began collecting religious art and relics which had been tossed out and put up for sale online.  I looked for and began to paint Spanish Colonial and Baroque religious art. I was trying to replicate what had been removed from the churches; but even more deeply, I was trying to make present something only priests can do  - only priests can confect the Eucharist.  Only priests make Christ present among us as he truly was at Bethlehem, body, blood, soul, and divinity.

This is what we try to imitate at Christmas with our decorations and nativities - yet Christ is the Mass ... 'I AM the Bread of Life'.  The Mass is Christ's Mass.  We come to adore, to worship and to receive.  Our altars should reflect this splendor, this glory, that is Christ's Mass.

This is a splendid nativity

many of us would want,

yet we had it in our churches

when the Blessed Sacrament was 

reserved on a splendid altar

and the Eucharist was

solemnly

celebrated in mystery

and beauty.