Contemplate Christmas with new eyes

Guest editorial by Fr Sean Wales CSsR

And is it true? And is it true,

This most tremendous tale of all,

Seen in a stained-glass window’s hue,

A Baby in an ox’s stall?

The Maker of the stars and sea

Become a Child on earth for me?

In a poem titled Christmas John Betjeman described London in the days running up to Christmas: The paper decorations, the shops strung with silver bells, people rushing to buy last-minute presents.

Then he breaks in on this scene with his radical question: and is it true?

This most tremendous tale of all: we are celebrating Christmas 2012 in the Year of Faith and this must surely reveal the inner meaning of a feast the real nature of which is often concealed by external trappings.

What faith reveals is that Christmas is a Paschal feast. Many early Christian writers expressed this vividly: He became human that we might become divine (St Athanasius), the Word became incarnate so that becoming as we are, he might make us as he is (St Gregory of Nyssa).

Christmas is an integral part of the mystery of faith, part of the self-emptying of the Word, to live among us and through his life, death and resurrection draw us into the very life of God.

We love to give and receive gifts at Christmas. Indeed we can be so focused on what to get someone for Christmas or on what we might find in our stocking that we can forget that the key to understanding and celebrating Christmas is the very idea of Gift.

Christmas is the gift of divinity to our human race. Put that way, we can see that it is utterly gratuitous.

St Alphonsus liked to say that the paradise of God is the human heart. God so loves us that God gives himself away to us in his Son, the Word made flesh. God simply loves being with us. God even loves receiving our humble gift in return.

If our Christmas is to echo the first Christmas, if a Year of Faith Christmas is to have any special significance, there has to be something utterly gratuitous about our celebration: we mirror the first Christmas if there is some outreach to the poor, the homeless, the imprisoned.Let’s try giving to someone from whom we can expect no return, maybe not even a thank you.

We often ask children what they would like for Christmas. Perhaps we can ask ourselves what we need for a happy Christmas. How many cards make up a happy Christmas?How many packets of biscuits or handkerchiefs?

Or what Betjeman calls the sweet and silly Christmas things/Bath salts and inexpensive scent/And hideous tie so kindly meant.

Deep down we know that Christmas happiness does not depend on expensive gifts or exotic locations.

What we most need is a taste of silence, a prayerful pondering of the Gift of gifts, a treasuring in the heart of how God wants our love. There has to be time to sit still, to wonder, to be amazed again, to be thrilled by God.

This contemplative dimension of Christmas shifts our focus to those for whom Christmas is not yet good news: to the lonely, those without faith or friendship, to our contemporary shepherds/farm workers, to those who live in darkness and the shadow of death.

We know we have had a happy Christmas when our reception of the Gift of God has turned us into a gift to others.

The New Testament pattern is at work during Christmas: since God has loved us so much, we too should love one another (1 John 4:11).

Our Christmas translation of this becomes: since God has given us so much, we too should give to one another!Genuine Christmas contemplation never isolates us from the abandoned poor.

A contemplative approach to Christmas puts everything and everyone in proper perspective for us.

Immersed in the revelation of love, then we came to see that nothing: Can with this single Truth compare/That God was man in Palestine/And lives today in Bread and Wine.