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In this video recording, Elder Moses the Athonite talks about the Christmas celebration in Mount Athos. It is focused mainly on meditation on the Incarnation of Christ and the inner transformation in the mystery of the divine liturgy. There are no Christmas lights or Christmas trees.
Elder Moses:
Of course, on the Holy Mountain, we don’t have the ornaments and the atmosphere that are in the world. I mean there are no Christmas lights or Christmas trees, and the Feast is better lived in the mystery of the Divine Liturgy, following the Vigil for the Feast of Nativity of Christ, through inspired and divine hymns of the Nativity of Christ, after a fast of forty days, and a preparation through reading and prayer, in order to cleanse the soul as much as possible, to be able to live the great mystery of Christ’s Incarnation.
That is, the way in which the Great God, the One that cannot be encompassed by the Universe, the one surrounded by billions and billions of angels, accepts to fully take the human nature, except, of course, the sin, and to become Man, in the most supreme way.
As Saint Athanasius the Great says, “God could not humble Himself more completely than He did!”
Christ could have come into this world in glory, being served by billions of angels, so that people would have been surprised and wondered by Him, would have been moved and would have followed Him.
But that One came like a foreigner, poor, ugly, unknown, small, like nothing. No one received Him except the cave of the dumb animals. And there, in the cave of Bethlehem, the beginning of the reconstruction and salvation of the world took place.
Thus, the monks of Holy Mountain, after the all-night vigil for the Nativity of our Lord, and by their participation in the Holy Communion, they commune with Jesus Christ, the One who became flesh for our salvation, to strengthen them in the following twelve days, and throughout the rest of their lives, because in each Divine Liturgy we live, and we try to feel the Incarnation, the Preaching, the Miracles, the Crucifixion, the Burial, the Resurrection, and the Ascension of our Lord.
