Christmas Happens
"I’ve often thought of that time. That time when Sayah Attia and his men left.
Once they were gone, all we had left to do was to live.
And the first thing we did was… two hours later.
We celebrated the Christmas Vigil and Mass.
It’s what we had to do. It’s what we did.
And we sang the Mass. We welcomed that Child
who was born for us absolutely helpless and…
and already so threatened.
Afterwards, we found salvation in undertaking our daily tasks.
The kitchen, the garden, the prayers, the bells.
Day after day.
We had to resist the violence.
And day after day, I…. I think each of us discovered
that to which Jesus Christ beckons us.
It’s … to be born.
Our identities as men go from one birth to another.
And from birth to birth, we’ll each end up
bringing to the world the child of God that we are.
The Incarnation, for us, is to allow the filial reality of Jesus
to embody itself in our humanity.
The mystery of Incarnation remains what we are going to live.
In this way what we’ve already lived here
takes root as well as…
what we’re going to live in the future."
Brother Christian, "Of Gods and Men"
*************
Dear Kate.
How is one to speak about Christmas authentically?
I love Dickens' "A Christmas Carol," but one can also make a case that it is pure hokum. For who can be scared into being good, his generosity sustained life-long by a vision of his future downfall and the passion to escape it?
"I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach," Scrooge proclaimed at the end.
We all know, say, overeating is going to very possibly land us on surgery table, but does that gruesome vision of our future help to stop us? In fact we say we now know more about ourselves, that maybe our present troubles have their root in a past that was forced upon us, something that was done to us, something we couldn't do much about now other than blaming those who planted the seeds of our downfalls. Attack the system and we can have a better future.
Bad sermon, Dickens.
To speak authentically Christmas is to speak authentically Christian--that is, to speak authentically human.
The quote today I posted a paper copy of it a feet away from where I am sitting now in my office. It's from a movie that has garnered many accolades, including a top one at the most prestigious Cannes film festival, a movie that speaks most authentically about the Christian vocation.
A Trappist monk spoke the words above, prayed eyes wide open with his brothers on Christmas Eve, after an invasion of their monastery by an Islamic fundamentalist group, the distance between life and death no longer than a pull of a trigger or two.
When you speak authentically Christian, the cynics and hopeless will accuse you of being too effusive, too exuberant in your magnificent outpourings, too much laughter from you they say, yet at the same time the triumphalistic politicians, visionaries who are restless for a resolution and revolution in the here and now will say you are not going far enough, that there is too much restraint and unnecessary ambiguity in your cryptic message, not enough actionable items, too long a wait for any tangible results, that they don't want your tears anymore.
The very thin space between Heaven and Earth, that's where a Christian plays, where Christmas happens.
Yours, Alex
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