The Christmas Mass
Homily Text by Abbot Peter McCarthy
Given at Midnight Mass, December 25th, 2011
Dom Peter McCarthy has served our community as abbot since 1995.
Perhaps you will agree with me that Christmas is a time for storytelling, I mean the really good stories we long remember & retell throughout our lives…even if we just tell them to ourselves! I ask for my brothers patience here as I read again, this year, just two sentences from one of my favorite stories of all time, Dylan Thomas’ A Child’s Christmas in Wales. And I ask you, does it not capture in so few words, something of the heart of Christmas… or at least capture our longing?
Looking through my bedroom window,
out into the moonlit and the unending smoke colored snow,
I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill
and hear the music rising from them up the long, steadily falling night.
I turned the gas down, I got into bed.
I said some words to the close and holy darkness,
and then I slept.
The British linguist & master storyteller J.R.R. Tolkien (famous for his Trilogy of the Rings) wrote that a really good story is always circulating around light & darkness, hope & discouragement, about seemingly ordinary people who find the courage daily to walk into darkness, & the hope within them to watch for the light. We are “captured” by these themes because they are ours; they are woven into our own personal stories as well.
It reminds me of my one & only experience of visiting the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem some years ago. You can guess what I was expecting. I was going to stand in one of the most sacred spaces on the face of the earth! And yet… I was quite surprised at how old & dilapidated the church itself looked (you had to crouch down even to get into the front door) it looked more like a barn door… and once in you climbed down a too dark & too narrow stairwell into an even darker & grimier long narrow cave covered with tattered wall hangings over seemingly rough- hewn & charred stone. AND YET… right there in what seems the smokiest & messiest spot in all of Bethlehem, RIGHT THERE on the floor is this worn brass - gold star with the unmistakable words around it: HERE (HIC) RIGHT HERE IN THIS PARTICULAR SPOT the Word became FLESH. Certainly, my brothers & friends, it was NOT the type of “holy” setting I expected!
While they were there (in Bethlehem) the time came for her
to have her child and she gave birth to a son, her first born.
She wrapped him in swaddling clothes and
laid him in a manger, that is, a feeding trough because
there was no room for them at the inn.
Like all really good stories; this Christmas Story challenges each of us, each time we hear it. The darkness, the obvious poverty of the setting & the homelessness of the family; each one of these basic threads we can find in the darkness of our own fears & anxieties & certainly very evident in our world of today. The challenge is to find God inside the darkness & anxieties of our daily lives. As one contemporary writer has said “We watch like the shepherds when we look at our world, with all that’s in it, both good & bad, and see light there, namely, God’s presence.”
Now it seems to me, that it is very difficult for us to face the challenge of this Christmas story because it is difficult for us both to imagine and accept how truly physical, earthy, and messy this story really is. So as listeners we split into two groups
In the first group of listeners among us (really, within us) we have the Spiritualists… this group did beautiful illuminated manuscripts in the medieval period… in our own day they make up most of the Hallmark card designers this holiday season They are forever wanting to paint this Christmas gospel in stained glass… to make Jesus’ birth solely a miraculous event… not a really physical, messy, actual child birth event!
NO, the whole Christmas story is beautiful & washed in a golden hue with pure, white snow & Christmas lights.
Then there’s the second group of listeners to tonight’s gospel: the speculative theologians among us- (actually within us). They are forever trying to turn the story of Jesus birth into something “deeper” something more symbolic – more archetypal – than physical. " We don’t know exactly where Jesus was born let alone when He was born". And the evangelist certainly doesn't want us to take this “stable – barn theme” this "manger-feeding trough setting” too seriously.
I want to say directly to our inner spiritualists & to our speculative theologians that Luke does want us to take the details of this Christmas Gospel seriously. Jesus’ birth is placed inside a stable-barn because, among other things, barns don’t look like cathedrals and animals don’t smell like incense. There’s a brute earthiness to a barn, there’s real life smells you don’t get in church. You see, this kind of story, Luke’s kind of story, makes it very difficult for us NOT to split into groups… BECAUSE we are “spiritual” people (that’s why we are here at midnight Mass!) And in most spiritual imaginations – whatever the religious tradition – we can act as if the way to God involves escaping the physical – and getting free of the contaminating messiness (and smells) of everyday life. But Luke’s Christmas gospel moves in the opposite direction…that’s the kind of story it is! The fact that God is born into our material world and takes on a human body blesses and sanctifies the physical world and our own bodies. It also means that we can find meaning and salvation without having to denigrate either our bodies or the physical world. The old moral dualisms- the spiritual against the physical, the clean against the messy – break down in this Christmas story. It is really one of the primary themes in all of Luke (& it should shock us if we could hear it!)… Suddenly when we are immersed in the messy ordinariness of life – we find ourselves in the presence of God! (Just like those shepherds)
My sisters & brothers, what this gospel tells us is that faith in God does not remove us from the messiness of real life. It does not insulate us from life’s poverty & pain. But the fact that Christ became flesh means (in the words of the angel to the shepherds) that a savior has been born to us… so that we never again have to walk through loneliness, sickness, violence, anxiety, and death alone. But even more than this: remember the angel’s words “Do Not be afraid”… In Jesus, God now has entered fully the messiness of our world of flesh: God is breathing our air; God’s heart is beating; God’s eyes in Jesus are seeing; his hands are touching, his ears are hearing AND therefore the Christmas Gospel tells us THAT IN EVERY HUMAN EXPERIENCE JESUS HIMSELF IS ATTEMPTING TO REACH US; IS TRYING TO GIVE HIMSELF TO US.
I began this reflection suggesting that it is very difficult for most of us to hear Luke’s Christmas gospel & not separate from our own everyday experience as “creatures of flesh”. BUT it is not impossible & some men & women, older & wiser, have certainly accomplished it! In one of the last Christmas homilies before his own death, the great theologian of our own time, Fr. Karl Rahner, expressed the simple & profound faith of a Christmas shepherd that sustained his own journey toward the light. These are his words:
God has entrusted his last, deepest, and most Beautiful word
to the world, in the Word made flesh.
This Word says: I love you world, man & woman. I am here.
I am with you. I am your life. I am your time.
I weep your tears. I am your joy.
Do not be afraid.
When you do not know how to go any further,
I am with you.
I am in your anguish, because I suffered it myself.
I am in your need & your death, because today,
(this Christmas morning)
I began to live & to die with you.
I am your life. I promise you; for you, too, Life is waiting.
“And suddenly there was a multitude of
The heavenly host with the angel,
praising God & saying:
Glory to God in the highest & on earth
peace to those on whom his favor rests.”
+ Abbot Peter