Rejoice!

We come now to Advent – the beginning of the Church’s year.

We wait.  We wait for Christmas, the great festival of the incarnation.  It is something like a gestation – for, like Mary, we are great with child.

God has spoken a creative Word, and even now it is taking flesh and bones.  The incarnation is beginning.

At Christmas time, the life of God will issue again into the world.

Christmas will, I hope, be a time of hospitality, of openness one to another; a time to rest, to share our lives and stories, to play games.   There will be something of the carnival about it.  We will suspend our rivalries, and even the lowliest will be honoured.  All will have status.

At Christmas, we remember that there is such a thing as a social bond.  This feast is for us what, perhaps, the great festival of Corpus Christi was in the Middle Ages—a “social miracle”.  Rowan Williams describes it as

The extraordinary processes by which sectional loyalties were from time to time interrupted and overcome by a sense of integration, of belonging with an entire social body extending far beyond one’s choice or one’s affiliations of interest and ‘natural’ loyalty. 

We will remember that love is still possible—even in this too, too cynical age.   Trust and friendship are still possible.

 

2.

We await the birth of Christ.

We await the renewal of society.

The incarnation is not merely an event of the past: it goes on, sometimes hiddenly, sometimes openly.  The mystery of the Church continues in human history.    Christ is born.   At the heart of society is a mystical body.

Our lives are woven together, one in another.   We know about love and friendships that have meant very much to us.   We know about human vulnerability and kindness.   There is a mystery of human entwinement.

See, the Human One!

There is a social bond.  For all our separateness, hostility, competitiveness—we are one.  Perhaps, most of the time, we are not conscious of our unity one with another.  But there it is.   Each of us is a being-in-relationship.  It is as if we have roots that stretch deep into the soil of the past and fan out widely into the lives of many people.  Our stories are part of the other people’s stories; and they are part of other stories, to the ages of ages.  The whole story cannot be told, or remembered, or imagined: it is too vast, too deep—but we are part of it.   We are part of this spiritual reality.  And we can live into it, if we have charity, if we have friendship one with another.

At Christmas, the Christ child will be born.  God will be born again, so to speak.  The social bond will be renewed.

We shall rejoice, as the poet John Betjeman said

That God was man in Palestine
And lives today in Bread and Wine.

 

3.

And yet: Christmas has a dual nature.  A Janus face? I don’t know.

The feast of Christmas is threatened by a kind of imperialism of the corporate world, which would destroy so much that is sacred and traditional.  So much of it is about disenchantment—kitsch Christmas carols and shopping malls.   Sadly, for many, it is a stressful and expensive time.  It is about materialism and status anxiety.   It is about credit card debt.  It is not about openness and availability one to another, not really.   It is about performance.

What happened to the feast of the incarnation?

So let’s be counter-cultural.

Let us hallow the coming season by remembering what is really sacred—our entwinement, one with another, in the secret place of the heart.  And God is this social bond; God is our equality, for God is love.

From Christ the whole body is fitted and held together by every supporting ligament;… [and it] grows and builds itself up in love.

Let us seek to live into the Holy One in our midst by charity, by friendship—going out of ourselves into the other.  Let us transcend our narrowness, our coldness, our cynicism.  Let our hearts be soft.  May we greet the stranger, those who might be different from us in whatever way.

Then we will make a good Advent.

…

So let us rejoice, in the words of one poet (Brad Reynolds SJ “Gaudete”)…

 

Because Christmas is almost here
Because dancing fits so well with music
Because inside baby clothes are miracles.
Gaudete

Because some people love you
Because of chocolate
Because pain does not last forever
Because Santa Claus is coming.
Gaudete

 

Because of laughter
Because there really are angels
Because your fingers fit your hands
Because forgiveness is yours for the asking
Because of children
Because of parents.
Gaudete

 

Because the blind see.
And the lame walk.
Gaudete

 

Because lepers are clean
And the deaf hear.
Gaudete

 

Because the dead will live again
And there is good news for the poor.
Gaudete

Because of Christmas
Because of Jesus
You rejoice.

Amen