Christmas
Fr. Albert
St. Peter Catholic Church, New Iberia
Why? Why are you here? Family? Tradition? Because the Church says so? A mixture perhaps? It sure is an interesting phenomenon, though. A bunch of Americans sitting in a comfortable Church listening to me talk all because 2000 years ago a poor Jewish woman had a baby that she put in a manger for a crib. Of course, that Child was and is the savior of the world. God has become man, our King is here among us, and we sing Joy to the World! Such a happy time of year with good food, delightful music, wonderful parties, and presents! Let us rejoice in the arrival of our Prince of Peace!
Yet, strangely, the closer you get to the actual location of this historic event, the less peace you will find. War-torn: that is how many describe the Middle East. Sure, the actual cities of Bethlehem and Jerusalem aren’t in a full-blown war, but I’ve been there. Military police everywhere, a massive wall, strict regulations of movement, and just over 300 miles to the north is the now infamous city of Aleppo where people are still dying in the streets. That’s less than the 6 hour drive I made at Thanksgiving to San Antonio to see my parents!
And then there are the disasters much closer to home. How many of us suffer through ugly family feuds and grudges? How many of us look forward more to our family leaving than them coming to visit? How many people are altogether alone right now? Homeless and Hungry? With all the suffering and death in the world, do we have any right to celebrate our peaceful and relatively affluent little holiday? If we do, then why am I up here bringing everyone down with these depressing thoughts? I’ll answer that last one with a story.
During one of my visits to a nursing home as seminarian, I saw something that really struck me. I was helping out at a Mass and had been given the task of bringing communion down the hallway to residents who couldn’t come to the common room. All the way down the hall, in the last room on the right, was a gentleman with a particularly difficult situation. He was bedridden, completely blind and completely deaf. Before he had lost his other senses, he had learned some basic communication through touches in the palm of his hand.
A woman with me began to sign a message into his hand. As soon as he realized that she was telling him to sit up and receive Holy Communion, he practically leapt to a seated position and eagerly opened his mouth. This man was not only ready to receive communion; he was bursting with Joy.
Here was a man almost dead to the world. Stuck in total silence, total darkness. Only a few people in the world knew how to communicate with him and they weren’t there all the time. What kind of loneliness must he have felt? Who among us can even imagine living a single day the way he had spent years? I was a seminarian at the time and now I’m a priest. I’ve trained years to focus my whole life on the Eucharist and the sacraments – I’m still not sure I’ve ever felt or shown the amount of Joy that this man expressed when he received communion on an ordinary Friday morning. How could someone with so many reasons to be sad, to lose hope, be so easily moved to joy all because a man he’s never met put a small wafer of bread upon his tongue? So much joy despite living in such darkness and with complete silence?
It is precisely because of the silence, because of the darkness and isolation that this man was able to have such joy. He knew the hollowness of all the world’s promises, he knew how little and insignificant he was, he knew how much he depended on others, and on God above all, just to stay alive. He also knew that it was no wafer of bread that had been brought to him from out of the void. No, it was God himself, who humbly took on a lowly form just to come to him in his darkness.
And that is why I mention the hungry, the homeless, and those suffering unspeakable evils in Aleppo and the middle east. Yes, it is a great joy and a gift that Christ came to us as a little baby, but it is too easy to forget why that is a gift. So often in life, it is not until we have suffered that we learn to be grateful. Christ did not come to us as a little baby so that we can have eggnog and sing carols. No we sing and feast becausehe came to us. And the reason his coming is such a cause for joy, the reason his coming makes us go to Mass, the reason his coming literally divided all of human history into two time periods is that we are a people in darkness and he is the light.
His light breaks in upon the darkness of human history like the sudden touch of a familiar hand for that man who was deaf and blind. This God who came as a man, this God who hides himself behind the appearance of bread and wine; this God knows our pain and our loneliness. This God gives meaning and hope even in the midst of the most utterly meaningless suffering. And that is a cause for Joy.
So, yes, we are right to celebrate our little, or not so little holiday even while the world seems to be burning. Even though many suspect next year could be filled with even greater darkness and destruction, we can look forward with Hope. Because our God came to us in that destruction. Our God was homeless. Our God was rejected and persecuted. Our God took on a frail human body for the express purpose of allowing himself to die in that body. All to show us that Love conquers all.
And so celebrate greatly this Christmas! The season doesn’t end tomorrow, but goes for two more weeks! Keep celebrating because God came to bring light, that is, love, into our darkness. The more the world suffers in the cold darkness, the more we need to show it the warm light of love, of family, of good food, merry carols, and the courage to “waste” time and money on people simply because we love them and want them to know it. Dear people of God, Dear beloved children, you must feast! You must rejoice! For the world is looking for joy in power, money, and pleasure, but it finds none. They must see that our feasting is not like their feasting. They must see that we are not happy because we feast, but that we feast because we are happy.
And how, how can you become joyful before the food and drink? Before you open presents? By recognizing your own blindness; by admitting that you are deaf. Learn to recognize and admit you are broken, sinful, inconstant, proud, selfish, but most of all… you are loved and because of that Love, you have been given a brother in the flesh who is your God, your redeemer, and your closest friend.
And that friend was not satisfied to come to you once 2000 years ago. Our Lord came once and now he wishes to come to you Every. Single. Week. Even every day if you have the time! He comes, humble as always, this time hidden behind the appearance of food. But he comes to you. Here is the source of our joy; the source of our hope; the source of our feasting. The blind, deaf man may have been cut off from the world, but he was also unburdened by it; able to be detached from worldly pleasures and the illusory satisfactions of sin. Christmas is the beginning, but not the end. Sit up, open your heart, your mind, your soul. Receive his pardon and his humble invitation, not just today, but every week and every day. Then, receive your God… and rejoice!