Christmas is not over! It doesn’t matter that you’re no longer hearing carols everywhere you go—that you’ve already taken down your decorations and stored them for another year—that you’ve already made, and perhaps even given up on, your New Year’s resolutions. The Christmas season continues. The Wise Men don’t arrive until tomorrow. The Holy Family is still in Bethlehem, not yet on their way to Egypt. The Church provides “the twelve days of Christmas” to give us time to reflect on the Incarnation and what the Reality of God with us in human vesture, as Christ Jesus, means for us today.

In our collect for today, we pray: “Grant that we may share the divine life of him who humbled himself to share our humanity, your Son Jesus Christ.” Is that the prayer of your heart today? As I sat with that petition, I remembered the phrase: “God became man so that man might become God,” but I couldn’t remember who said it, thinking it might be Athanasius or Augustine. Googling, I found that, while they both proclaimed it in the 4th and 5th centuries, it was Irenaeus in the 2nd century who seems to have been inspired with what theologians have come to call deification, divinization, theosis, sanctification: “The Word of God, our Lord Jesus Christ, who did, through His transcendent love, became what we are, that He might bring us to be even what He is Himself.” I was fascinated to discover that, while I generally think of deification as a particular aspect of Eastern Orthodoxy, it is addressed in Roman Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, and Protestant theology as well, even though we may hear little about it in our churches today. Perhaps that is because it is one of those divine activities we have to experience for ourselves, not just hear or read about.

Just how we may share the divine life of Christ as we go through our day-to-day living remains a mystery. As with all prayer, it requires our cooperation, our desire, our will to accept God’s deifying grace working in us to transform us into an incarnation of God’s love, to share Christ’s divine life in the Kingdom of God here and now.