Christmas 2007 (Manresa Hall Mass at Midday)
I join my personal greeting to greetings from all those who have known and loved you through the years. Celebrating what we have seen and heard I say again: Merry Christmas. The Christ Child comes again into this world of ours to bring us a joy symbolized in the songs and the sweet treats of the season.
Two one liners simply to free our spirits: When did the baby Jesus first get on a airplane? On the flight into Egypt. What nationality is Santa Claus? North Polish.
This year Tim Brown sent me some Christmas writings composed by Joseph Ratzinger years ago when Ratzinger was the Archbishop of Munich. They are beautifully re-presented in this book “The Blessing of Christmas” illustrated with two dozen color plates of classical Christian art.
Ratzinger calls the first of his sermons: An Advent Dialogue with the Sick. I enjoyed the whole text. Yet let me simply give a brief outline and read something from its introduction and each of its three parts.
[During the Christmas season], Ratzinger writes, “the burden of sickness prevents us from truly sharing in the joy others feel….but perhaps Advent [and Christmas] can help us discover the unobtrusive grace that can lie in the very fact of being sick.” (p.15). He goes on to speak of visitation, of waiting and of joy.
His writings suggest that the sick place themselves in the position of Elizabeth whose confinement and immobility have allowed her to be the subject of a visit. This visitation could have been from negative powers. But, on the contrary, the mother of her savior comes to see her in her confinement; her visitation is a joyful one.
Ratzinger writes: “perhaps we should try an experiment. Let us understand the individual events of the day as little signs that God sends us…To keep an inner diary of good things would be a beautiful and a healing task…--[a diary of visits of all kinds, for example. This diary would be]--… one way that God can come to us and be close to us.”
About waiting in this season, Ratzinger writes: “In his life here on earth, man is one who waits. As a child he wants to be an adult; as an adult he wants to forge ahead and be successful; and finally he yearns for rest. At last there comes a time when he realizes that he has hoped for too little.”
A Christian waits for that Jesus who will bring all of us together into his kingdom. But if the present moment remains completely empty, to wait becomes, Ratzinger says, “completely intolerable.” “But when time itself is meaningful and each moment contains something valuable of its own, the joyful anticipation of something greater, something still to come, makes even more precious that which we already experience. And it gives us a kind of invisible force that bears us across the individual moments.”
Jesus Christ penetrates our time of waiting and hears our prayer, our lamentations, our questions, our praise.
Finally about joy, Ratzinger quotes the psalms that speak of nature expressing the joy of the Christmas season: of the trees breaking into songs of praise and of the rivers that flow with milk and honey. So we sing and eat sweet treats.
“It may be difficult for us,” he says, “to accept this joyful music… when we are afflicted both by bodily illness and psychological problems…but this child is a sign of hope precisely for those who are oppressed…his consoling power can touch the hearts even of unbelievers.”
May the Christ child today fill us with quiet visitations so that we wait with a joyful hope.