Christmas/Holy Innocents

Perhaps the challenge of the Christmas season is whether we can hear familiar stories and songs with wonder, not the yawn of “déjà vu.”  Can we allow the stories we’ve heard a thousand times—of a journey to Bethlehem, a stable, angels, shepherds and magi, to resonate at a deeper level this year? Can we attend with care to whatever God wants to birth in us during this season? As Eugene Ionesco warns, “over-explanation separates us from astonishment.” Perhaps the rest of the year can be cut-and-dried, but this is the season for mystery to flourish.

It helps to read Caryll Houselander’s The Reed of God, which points out how ordinary the Christmas story is. God doesn’t ask Mary to enter a cloister or become a heroic missionary to cannibals. Her life carries on much as it might’ve before Gabriel’s visit. In fact, “God did mean it to be the ordinary thing” so Christ can be born “in every human being’s life and not, as a rule through extraordinary things.”

The quiet simplicity contrasts with the way of the zealot: loud, attention-seeking and forcing everyone into the same mold. The Christmas message is that we give hearts and hands to God, each unique life bearing Christ into the world. Whether we’re paying bills, mopping floors, buying groceries or washing cars, we are new faces of God. As Ilia Delio writes in The Hours of the Universe, “Each of us is a little word of the Word of God, a mini-incarnation of divine love.”

The juxtaposition of Christmas joy with the slaughter of the innocents three days later might seem a downer. Or, it’s the deeper meaning of the feast. Finally, an answer to our pain: One who shares it, is born into exile and the power of stupid thugs which may be delayed at his birth, but eventually slaughters him too, innocent victim of brutal violence like the children of Gaza and Ukraine. Then and now, Christ weeps over needless death, knowing it first-hand.  

“Life will prevail,” Houselander wrote during the London blitz, as the air raid sirens screamed and the bombs fell. She described a life and peace much stronger, more enduring and real, than the world’s. And for that, we have the promise of Christ, whose love song never missed a beat.