Christmas helps us recall a deeper truth

For Christians everywhere, Easter is reputed to be the most important feast of the year. And, officially it is, but, truth to tell, in the public consciousness, Christmas wins hands down. Because Christmas is full of memories that catch, even demand our attention. And even when the memory becomes faded through time or circumstance, for no apparent reason at all we find ourselves immersed in flashbacks of Christmas past that insist on forcing their way to the surface.

John McGahern, in his novel, Amongst Women, in his characteristic limpid style, captures the atmosphere of Christmas times in rural Ireland in his focus on the Moran sisters ‘coming home for Christmas’:

Once the Moran girls crossed the bridge the church appeared like an enormous lighted ship in the night. There was something wonderful and moving about leaving the car by the roadside and walking together in the cold and darkness towards the great lighted church. The girls clasped hands in silence and drew closer together as they walked. Once they passed through the church-gates several people came over to them to welcome them home and to wish them a happy Christmas, whispering how well they looked and they bowed away with little nods and smiles. 

The church itself was crowded and humming with excitement. There were many others like the Moran girls who had come home for Christmas. They would all be singled out as they came away from the altar rail after receiving Communion and discussed over hundreds of dinners the next day: who was home and where they were living and what they worked at and how they looked and who they got their looks from and what they wore last night as they came away from the rail. As good-looking girls in their first flowering, the three Morans were among the stars of the Communion rail that Christmas night.

The Christmas story has been told so often, and the simple message so often rehearsed, that we need poets to present it time and again in all its stark beauty, as the poet Pádraig J. Daly, does in his love-poem, Christmas:

We listen to the story again:

An exotic visitor 

Comes to a countrygirl 

In a mountain town 

And nine months afterwards 

God’s wisdom is a footling child.

Shepherds arrive at the place, 

Summoned by music;

And scholars from some distant part, 

Tracking a light.

But why did not the sun, for awe, 

Lose its footing in the sky?

Why did seas not charge across the astonished land?

Why did every horse in every paddock everywhere 

Not break into delirious chase?

By what foul means were linnets stilled?

And how can we, 

Loving so little, 

Fettered by knowledge, 

Believe in such excessive love?

That’s the miracle of Bethlehem – that at a human level, the wonder is that the birth of the Christ-child ushered in ‘such excessive love’ 2,000-plus years ago that, more than 20 centuries later, the word Christmas (Christ-mas) still rings that joyful bell of faith and hope and love.

In his ‘First Coming’ into our world, Jesus opened up for us the prospect of ‘a kingdom of truth and life, a kingdom of justice and peace’. And even though his Second Coming, which marked the end of times, is awaited by the faithful, William Butler Yeats, in his poem, Second Coming, predicts first that a period of tribulation and moral decline can be expected as evil stalks our world – in Yeats’ words, as ‘things fall apart, the centre cannot hold’ and ‘mere anarchy is loosed upon the world’ as ‘the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity’, and a ‘rough beast slouches towards Bethlehem to be born’.

In the present chaotic and apocalyptic state of the world, commentators sometimes point to the present breakdown in morality and to a world on the brink of imminent war as a disintegration in cosmic communication - in Yeats’s telling image ‘the falcon cannot hear the falconer’ - representing as it does a fundamental loss of contact with the true sources of life.

It’s as if with Trump and Putin holding the world to ransom and more often than not when truth and falsehood and right and wrong are for so many seemingly impossible to distinguish, so many too seem to identify more easily with the ‘rough beast’ slouching towards Bethlehem rather than the love ushered into our world by the baby born in a Bethlehem stable.

Christmas helps us to recall a deeper truth. God so loved the world that he sent his son amongst us to remind us of that overarching and compelling truth that God loves each one of us beyond all our imagining or expectation. The difficulty is with the question Pádraig J. Daly poses – how can we / Loving so little / Fettered by knowledge / Believe in such excessive love? – that our divided and misfunctioning world and our personal failures can blind us to the vibrant presence of a God who loves us regardless of anything we have done or failed to so – how can we, / Loving so little / Fettered by knowledge / Believe in such excessive love?

And yet and yet, we can, because of the promise represented by Bethlehem and the child once wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger, the child who grew up to become our Saviour and who died on a cross on Calvary. That’s the extraordinary belief that is ours and once again we savour its truth by visiting the Crib and mulling over yet again and again, year after year, the unremitting truth that God loves us.

The words of poet, John Betjeman, in his celebrated poem, brings us to the heart of Christmas:

And is it true? For if it is...

No love that in a family dwells, 

No carolling in frosty air, 

Nor all the steeple-shaking bells 

Can with this single Truth compare - 

That God was man in Palestine 

And lives today in Bread and Wine.

I wish all my readers the blessings of the Christmas season.