The Holy Cradle: A Sign of Eternal Love

In November during this Jubilee Year of Hope 2025, I had the privilege of traveling to Italy with a group of pilgrims from Brooklyn and Queens. The Basilica of St. Mary Major in Rome guards an important relic, especially poignant during the Christmas season: the Holy Cradle (Sacra Culla) containing five fragments of wood from the manger of the Infant Christ. Early accounts from Origen and St. Jerome testify that pilgrims visited the holy cave in Bethlehem and venerated the remains. Scientific studies also date the wood, which is from the Palestinian sycamore tree, to the first century A.D., around the time of Jesus’ birth.

Though many find stories of ancient relics almost beyond credulity, they point to the north star of our searching hearts—the Christ deeper than our genes and history, deeper than time—our eternal origin. Our spiritual evolution begins and ends in Christ, for he is “the firstborn of all creation” (Colossians 1:15). 

Drawing upon ancient motifs, Christmas bells ring in the joy of a wedding and a birth—the marriage of heaven and earth, divinity and humanity, in the person of the Son of God born of the Virgin Mary. When the two became one deified flesh, the family of human persons begotten of the Father commenced with the Mother of God. From henceforth, all persons born of “water and Spirit” (John 3:5) enter into the communion of the Holy Trinity, the archetype of the family. 

Climbing the mountain of the Lord through Advent with Isaiah and the prophets, we arrive at the summit, the person of Christ, who is also the base and the entire cosmic mountain itself. Enveloped in Christ from beginning to end, the cosmos exults in the Love that never ends.

A Christmas Poem

The Earth gave birth to Heaven
Without seed on Christmas morn;
Sown by the Holy Spirit,
Through a Virgin, Christ was born.

Silently, the Word took flesh
In the cradle of a womb,
Marrying his beloved,
Becoming Israel’s Groom.

The wedding of two in One
Son bore a family in Three;
Deified persons in Christ
Mirroring the Trinity.

In the beginning God breathed
His life into man’s nostrils.
Divine in her origin,
Earth clings to God like tendrils.

Creation grows like a seed
From eternity through time’s
Chaos and cataclysms
As the Lord’s mountain she climbs.

Christic in her origin,
Christic in her end,
Creation exults with Jesus,
Her Bridegroom and her Friend.