[Meditationes seu Contemplationes devotissimae] (1473) - Page 5

...flesh, may be born again of the Spirit of God and obtain by grace that which you do not have by nature.

The fifth is about the birth of Christ

Admirable commerce! The Creator of the human
race, taking an animated body,
deigned to be born of a virgin: and
proceeding as man without seed, he bestowed
upon us his divinity. Often, indeed, in diverse
ways and in many measures, the divine goodness
has consulted for the human race and has
clemently bestowed many gifts of its
providence upon all throughout the ages.
But in the last times it exceeded all the
superabundance of its accustomed goodness
when in Christ it descended, mercy to sinners,
truth to those wandering, life to the dead,
and that Word, eternal and equal to the
Begetter in the unity of his divinity, assumed the
nature of our humanity, so that God born of God,
the same also as man should be born of man.
O birth, unblemished in sanctity, honorable,
lovely to the world, in the magnitude of its benefit
to men uninvestigable, and in the depth of its
mystery even to the angels sacred, and in all
these things admirable for its singular
excellence of novelty, as it is one that
neither was seen to have a predecessor
nor is seen to have a successor, where the
birth is without pain, alone ignorant of
shame, unaware of corruption,

not opening but obeying the temple of the
virginal womb. And therefore, rightly,
O faithful soul, it behooves you to exult
and to be glad, because on this day, by
the birth of our Lord, the devil is defeated,
his right is lost, and the world has
received salvation.

The seventh is about the circumcision of Christ

A great sacrament of piety! The eternal
Word, which God spoke once, he does
not repeat; the immense Word, which
the whole universe could not contain, of which
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word
was with God, and the Word was God"—this
Word, I say, God made abbreviated upon the
earth, who, clothing himself in human flesh
in the womb of a virgin, reduced himself to
measure. He is an infant, but he is abbreviated
today, having been made public by the received
sign of circumcision in the flesh. If indeed
this Word in his conception was lessened
a little less than the angels, receiving the form
of man, but in the circumcision which was
decreed in the law against original sin, he is
lessened much more, receiving the form
of a sinner. O wondrous humility of yours,
good Jesus, you receive the circumcision
decreed in the law in the flesh, which you
opened in the flesh without any trace
of pollution at all.