CHRISTMAS
MEDITATION
“For Us a Child is
Born, For Us A Son is Given”
Circular No. 65; Series of 1986
December 19, 1986
Each year, as Christmas comes,
a moment of peace touches the earth. And this is especially true for us this
Christmas.
It is our first Christmas
after “the miracle at EDSA, our first Christmas in freedom after nearly two
decades of a dictatorship which brought us corruption and rapine, violence and
ruin. It is our first Christmas in seventeen years when the guns of revolution
have been stilled, and a truce (no matter how fragile) is in place. Christmas parols have returned to almost every home,
even to many shacks of the poor, — signs of hope born anew.
As the year ends, we count our
blessings. We remember once again our revolution without bloodshed; we think of
the quiet but brave leadership of a President who (in the words of Sr. Lucia of
Fatima) is “God’s — and Mary’s — gift to our people.” We run
over the events which were “given to us” after the ending of the Marian Year
1985, the “miracles” in which we discern the finger of the Lord, and we can
only express gratitude to the Lord, from the deep heart.
Many Christians of diverse
churches and congregations have summed up the events of 22-25 February by
simply saying that they were days of “God with us,” Emmanuel. (A new book, just
out in time for the
Christmas season, bears that title, God With Us — applied to the “four
days of February.”) For as people knelt and prayed, at EDSA or Santolan, or stood (with fear and courage struggling in
their hearts) to face troops and tanks, or slept on the pavement in night
watches, or shared bread broken in brotherhood and caring — their experience at
its deepest level was that of “God moving among his people,” making them one in
solidarity and courage, one people with one heart and one soul at last.
For “the miracle at EDSA” was
the miracle of our becoming one, across our many differences, for our
incredible days. And we who believe that unity was, in the last analysis, a
gift from God, who, in the interplay of human freedom and human events,
fulfills yet in time in his own majestic will.
CHRISTMAS IS
THE FEAST OF EMMANUEL, “GOD WITH US,” of God who came to share our human lot
and “to pitch his tent in our midst” (Jn 1:14). And so perhaps our prayer, as we kneel before the
manger of “God with us” is that in him and through him, we may be
given the power to be truly “at one” in mind and heart, in purpose and will;
that kapit-bisig may become more and
more a reality, and the secure foundation of our way to rebuilding our nation
in justice and peace.
Providentially, too, this may
be the whole point of the National Eucharistic Year, which our Bishops have
proclaimed, and whose theme and objective is ONE BREAD, ONE BODY, ONE PEOPLE.
We believe, in faith, that the
One Bread is Jesus crucified and risen, the same Jesus we worship as he lies, a
Child in the manger. We know that he, and he alone, has the power to make us
truly ONE BODY, we who partake of the ONE BREAD, and in us and through us, to
make our people truly ONE PEOPLE.
We must translate this faith
into the language of deeds, of praxis (as today’s usage will have it).
It is a dangerous temptation, especially for those who atirred
themselves and “laid their lives on the line” to make the February revolution,
to think that their participation is over and done with.
“Let Cory do it now,” — withdrawal from active involvement, indifference,
return to the comfortable, apathy — these very attitudes allowed a dictatorship
to grow and was more and more powerful in the recent past. The same attitudes
can lead to the betrayal, by default and absenteeism, of what the majority of
Filipinos sought to bring about, when they brought down the dictatorship. The
“revolution of justice, brotherhood and love” must go on; “Thy kingdom come”
must remain our daily prayer and our task, as citizens and Christians. The
summons calls us still: to personal involvement and participation, side by side
with others; to a certain passionate commitment, and
to the courage and the doing which must flow from that commitment.
PERHAPS WE CAN LEARN THIS,
TOO, FROM THE CHILD OF BETHLEHEM.
This child “came down from
heaven” to share our human history, in all its concreteness and ambivalence,
within the very center of the struggle between good and evil in the world. He
came, as the Creed tells us, “for our sake and for our salvation.” He took upon
himself a human life in every way like ours, sin alone excepted.
There were no exemptions: nothing was done by proxy. He mingled with us,
rubbed shoulders with us in the market place, ran the
gamut of human experience. He spared himself nothing. In the end he tasted
heartache, failure and betrayal, even the bitterness of our death. Nothing was
too much, in the living out of the commitment he made to his Father and to us, in the fulfillment of
the covenant he made with us and our race.
And the motive power for all
this, we know, was love. His love for His father, and
his love for us. His unbelievable love for us. “He
loved us to the end” (Jn 13:1). That was the
bottom line.
These thoughts may seem “too
heavy” for Christmas. But they are in fact, the “meaning-lines” of our
Christmas songs. Our loveliest carols are touched inevitably with pathos,
because crib and cross meet under the skies of Bethlehem.
I recall some lines from a
lullaby to the Christ Child, which we sang during our seminary days:
Dream, o my own, your dreams
be all of heaven.
Dream not of
sorrows that waits on the morrow for thee.
Dream of the
hearts that to thee will be given.
Feel not the pain of the
nails on the tree.
His commitment was the
straight line from Bethlehem to Calvary. We may not forget that, even as we hurry “to Joseph,
and Mary, and Child lying in the manger.” We will kneel then, you and I, with
the shepherds and the wise men under the stable roof, this Christmas night. We
will ask the Child who is born for us, the Son who is given to us, to teach us
how to love him, and our brothers and sisters in him, with a fire and passion not unlike his own. To teach us how we may become one in the
power of his love, that love which he shares with us in the Eucharist. With the
simplicity of the heart of our childhood, we will ask him to give us the
courage to commit ourselves to fulfill our tasks as Christians, as
his disciples, in our country today. So that we may become like him who was
“born for others, given for others.” GOD WITH US, EMMANUEL.
Venite adoremus. Come, let us adore him.
O HOLY NIGHT
Christmas reveals to us not
only that the final meaning of life is our “divinization,” our being made like
unto God himself. Christmas reveals to us also the final meaning of the
self-giving of God which is the incarnation. And Christmas brings us joy,
because it lights up everything, on this most blessed night. It reveals to us a
new face of God, it reveals to us a whole new side of
the divinity.
Christmas gives us the key to
unlock some of the deepest mysteries of our existence.
- Men asked themselves, in anguish, the
question of the “why” of humiliation, of one’s insignificance realized and
suffered in one’s whole being, of the suffering of the “least ones” of the
earth. Men flung these questions at God, but God gave no answers.
- Men even sought for reasons to remove
blame from God, for all the evils of history. (“It isn’t God who is the
cause...!”). But all these reasons could not silence the questions which came
from the depths of hearts in sorrow and pain.
But now, at Christmas, God
answers at last. And man at last is silent, and all his questions are stilled.
He simply listens now, he hears the story of this event of divine sweetness and
human tenderness: God is born, a child; God makes himself a sharer of our
history; God lies there, in the manger.
Here God does not speak words
to tell us why we suffer; simply he shares our suffering. God does not say, This is the “why” of your sorrows; simply, he becomes a man
of sorrows, afflicted with infirmity. He does not explain why we are humiliated
and broken by life; simply, he is humiliated too, and wounded, and broken like
us. And so, we are no longer alone in an immense world of solitude. We are not
in solitude any longer, but in solidarity.
The murmurings of the mind
grow silent, and the story-telling of the heart begins. The story begins, of a
God who makes himself a man, who does not ask questions but lives out their
answers, who does not give explanations, but whose life instead is the
explanation itself.
And so, my brother, our night
is all alight. The child who is born in Bethlehem tells us that everything has
a secret meaning, a secret meaning so deep that God has himself made it his
own. Our world may be a narrow tunnel, but God has entered into it, and now we
glimpse the bright light at its exit, and we know there is joy waiting for us
at its end.
It is worthwhile to be a man,
to share the life of men, because God chose to be a man like us. We are not
just a lost band of people as part of an anonymous faceless mass of mankind
which has no purpose or issue. God isn’t “up there” looking down with indifference
and unconcern on the human tragedy taking place below. No, God enters into
human history and makes our lot his own. He reveals to us that it is worth our
while to live just as we live our lives: monotonous lives, anonymous lives,
faithful lives in the midst of hardship and pain. He makes us understand that
it is worthwhile, in the midst of these lives, to try to make ourselves a
little better, each day; to try each day to be more patient with our ownselves and those around us, to be more strong in hearing
the contradictions of life, and to become wiser, as we bear them. For all these
realities God made his own, in his Word, the Word of God himself.
It was in human life, in all
its concrete reality, that God revealed himself; not inspite
of that humanity, but within it. Christianity does not proclaim the
death of God, but the humanity of God, the human goodness and love of
God. Let us look at the depths of the eyes of
this Child, and we shall see how in them shines the humanity, the
joyfulness, and the eternal youthfulness of our God.
And so, this Christmas night,
we shall try to be good people, better people, you and I, we shall try to be
truly brothers of one another. Let us remember what a great mystic and poet
once said: “Even if Christ should be born a thousand times over in Bethlehem,
as long as he is not born in your own heart, your life shall be lost and you
shall have been born to no purpose” (Angelus Silesius).
Let us shoulder our existence
with joy, just as Jesus took it up with joy. It is right that we try to be of
good heart and good cheer, gentle, sincere, loving towards others. For God
himself lived like this, made us see that all this is possible, even for us.
Let us look with reverence on
our mother and sisters, and on all women, and we shall discover in each of
them, today, on this holy night, a reminder and symbol of Mary, Virgin Mother
of the holy Child.
Let us look upon our brothers
with attentive and searching eyes, and we shall remember that each one is a
brother of Christ, and our brother also.
Let us make each man our
neighbor, and of every neighbor a brother. O, at least on this blessed
night, this holy night.
Let us throw our arms around
our children, and press them to our hearts, even as we embrace and press to our
hearts, this Child whom God has given us today.
Heaven and earth sing, this
peaceful and blessed night which God has made: “Glory to God in the highest,
and peace on earth to men of good will.”
Translation of a passage from
LEONARDO BOFF, OFM
“La Humanidad y la Jovialidad de Nuestro Dios.”
Translated by C.G. Arevalo, S.J.
