To rediscover the "worldliness" we must find out why Francis called Christmas "the feast of all feasts" (2Cel, 199). 

To some theologians such a statement sounds like an aberration of popular piety, for to them Easter (Good Friday until Pentecost) is the feast of all feasts. Unfortunately, in many places Christmas is nothing more than a sentimental commemoration devoid of commitment to existing realities or a flight into a nice perfect world that has nothing to do with the exigencies of the here and now.

However, Franciscan theologians, particularly John Duns Scotus, developed a theology of Christmas based on Francis’ spiritual experiences. John Duns Scotus takes the love of God as the point of departure. God is love, perfect self-giving and all self-abandonment. As such God cannot be understood as loneliness and being alone. God is self-sufficient but does not exist for the self alone. Hence, God wants a world of creatures who love themselves and others; a creation that is a network of relationships and; a reality that defines itself through relatedness and solidarity, not through exclusion and isolation. This is the reason why God is present to us in a unique way: in a creature in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. In Christ God loves the whole world and in return wants to be loved by the whole world. God wills that all come to recognize where lies their center and how they can grow into a unity of love.

For this reason Francis celebrates the presence of God in this world. For him, God is the humble one, the one who encounters him in the smallest things: in a child that is born in a stable, in the midst of homelessness and vulnerability of human beings, in their poverty and misery, in their plight caused by an economy and policies that accept as by-products, the existence of refugees and asylants, poor people and lepers. Christmas is for the Poverello of Assisi a challenge to overcome poverty, hunger and isolation. Christmas is the basis for the humanization of the human being. This is the reason why Francis asks the emperor and all those endowed with political authority to pass laws that take care of the needs of all. Therefore, for us Christmas is an invitation to seek God among human beings especially the poor, those who are suffering, the hungry creatures and the animals.

Christmas finds its continuation in the Eucharist. God is an everyday event of humility. Daily God descends into a plain piece of bread that people share with one another (Adm 1); God desires that each day people gather in the divine presence: no one must hold on to his/her selfish plans, no one seek only his/her own comfort and settle in for a false security. All must daily make a new start and venture out into new relationships with one another and with the whole of creation: the sea, the fields, earth and sky "until all shall be reconciled and filled with new life (LOrd) and the "blessed communion of Heaven" shall be experienced already here on earth."

Christmas means a daily overthrow of the usual order of values, and a radical change in the behavior of human beings. What is considered as small and insignificant, is to be thought of as great; and what appears as great and valuable must be ranked as small and unimportant.

God’s thoughts differ from those of human beings. The lepers belong in the center, the powerful have to move out. The Franciscan family must carry into the world the divinely-inspired revolutionary change that Mary praises in her Magnificat.

God is on with this world. Only those who, like God, involve themselves in this world and change its destiny for the better, stand on God’s side. The passion and the resurrection are consequences of this basic concept and are its climax. Those who believe in this religion of the incarnation and witness to it experience God as powerfully active in history.

Clare of Assisi witnesses in her own way to the same mystery of the incarnation of God. She takes up the mystical thought of her friend,. Francis, and deepens it. In a letter Francis defines the faithful as "mothers of God". Like Mary we can conceive, carry in our heart and body and give birth to God through good works. We can, thus, do our share to make God visible and truly present, seen and experienced in this world (2LF53). In her letter to her friend, Agnes of Prague, Clare shares the same thoughts that culminated from an inner experience. She writes:

"Love Him totally who gave Himself totally for your love. His beauty the sun and moon admire, and of His gifts there is no limit in abundance, preciousness and magnitude. I am speaking of Him who is the Son of the most High, whom the virgin brought to birth and remained a virgin after His birth. Cling to His most sweet Mother who carried a Son whom the heavens could not contain; and yet she carried Him in the little enclosure of her holy womb and held Him on her virginal lap" (IILCl, 15-19).

The infinitely Great One becomes limited, the incomprehensible One becomes touchable. Clare uses the theme of an ancient hymn to Mary:

Quem terra, pontus, aethera,      Colunt, adorant, praedicant, Trinam regentem machinam Claustrum Mariae bajulat.

He, whom earth, sea and sky praise, adore and venerate, He, the Lord of all three realms is enclosed in Mary’s womb.

It is important to reflect on the free self-limiting and self-confining of God. This truth must be the central thought of the Christian faith. Creation itself is already such an act of self-limitation. God withdraws, as it were, and limits the self so that creation may come into being and an autonomous history based on the freedom of human beings may be possible. When God reveals, then the God-self is made subject to creation, gives the self over into the hands of human beings to be touched and to become present in what is anything else but God.

From CCFMC, LU 1