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"O my heart, are you aware of who is coming to you today?"
— Diary of St. Faustina, 1810

We can easily get emotional at Christmas because it reminds us of many beautiful and truthful things. It reminds us, first, of Christmases past, when we were young and innocent and believed in the miraculous without question.

But mostly — and most rationally — Christmas reminds us of our better selves. After all, that was the life mission of that Child in the manger: to remind us of what we are meant to be and what we may yet become.

The bare facts of His biography stand in stark contrast to the bare facts of His legacy. He was born in present-day Palestine, worked as a carpenter, and never traveled more than 90 miles from His birthplace. He owned nothing. He never led a military force. He was executed as a common criminal out at the city limits of Jerusalem at the age of 33.

Yet to this day, more than 2,000 years later, for completely rational reasons, His birthday — Christmas Day, Dec. 25 — remains the most celebrated birthday in the history of the world.

We're still stunned by this Child in the manger. Maybe this year even more so. Like us, He lived in decidedly downwardly mobile times. The Romans ruled with an iron fist. The Jews lived in servitude. They yearned for hope and change, but they realized such things would have to be brought about by God. They knew they needed to prompt His intervention. But how? Some argued for a form of piety disengaged from the world. Some argued for acts of resistance and revolt.

Then Jesus came along and introduced another option. He wanted to change the world, but not through disengaging from it (quite the contrary) and certainly not through armed resistance (He insisted we must love our enemies). He echoed the words of the prophets and called for the wholehearted return to holiness. But He took it even further. He rebelled against the notions endorsed by His brethren that placed barriers between the people of the world — between the holy and unholy, the righteous and the sinners, the Jew and the Gentile.

Giving proof to the Old Testament prophets that God's greatest attribute is mercy, Christ looked around Him and saw the ways of the world as an affront to that mercy. He challenged the social system dictated at that time by the Pharisees — a system set up to revere a merciful God but that failed to extend such mercy to those in greatest need.

To underline His point, Jesus chose to engage with the sinners and outcasts. He vilified fake piety — outer lives that resembled stately temples while inner lives stank of corruption and decaying corpses.

Salvation, Christ proclaimed, is intended for all, not for simply one single ethnic group, not for the devout only, but for the sinner, too. He continues to remind us of this today through the revelations of St. Faustina. "The greater the sinner, the greater the right he has to My mercy," Christ says (Diary of St. Faustina, 723).

Such teachings got Him killed. Yet such teachings are the very thing that will save us today.

For good reason, Christ's mission may seem more meaningful than ever this year. Seeking security and comfort through material things, rather than through God, have been the hallmarks of the modern age. Most of us bought into this falsehood. Now many of us, by varying degrees, have been witnesses to its collapse.

Christ came and pointed to the only authentic "good life." And it's available to all. This is how we are to achieve it: Like Christ, we are to go about the world doing good. We are to do so quietly. We are to trust in the Lord above all else. We are to let His mercy flow through us to others. It's that simple. We know all this to be true because Christ located the power and authority of His teachings in the very place where they are least likely to be disregarded — in our own hearts, which confirm His truth.

He came first as a Child because He understands our hearts. He understands our capacity to love and to sacrifice ourselves for the sake of others. We show this capacity through our relationships with our own children. We love them. We'd do anything for them. Our children reassemble our souls and put us into accord with the Creator from Whom all creation comes.

Christ came as a Child because children remind us of our better selves. Our better selves tend to the duties of the everyday world while living and breathing and staking tender claim upon the Spirit world that envelops us.

Christ, the Child in Bethlehem, reminds us of what we are meant to be. We are meant to be like Him.

On Christmas Day, may we hold Him close. May we tell Him how He is loved. May we rock Him to sleep as He rocks us awake.