CHRISTMAS EVE LITURGY 2011
by Attracta Kelly, OP
I proclaim to you good news of great joy: Today a Savior is born for us, Christ the Lord.
And Luke tells us: “Mary gave birth to her son and wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger because there was no room for them in the inn.”
Last week one of the Sisters in our community who is known for her deep discernment in picking out movies treated the seven of us to a movie she had rented called Bethlehem. And while some of us, I must admit, may have uttered some inaudible remarks as we watched some rather exaggerated scenes, what we saw however was probably a lot closer to the reality of the Bethlehem of Mary and Joseph than the beautiful Christmas crib with the well–scrubbed shepherds and the watchful, cooperating, clean animals and not a single sign of stress.
Mary and Joseph are brought to Bethlehem by the command of the emperor. Like everyone else, they must be registered. They must submit to the powers that ruled their world, and which counted and taxed everyone. Their journey was a sign of their powerlessness. They were an oppressed people subject to the whims of an Emperor who treated them as not quite human. On this night, however, the real drama is not that of the Emperor and his court who decree that all should be enrolled. Although I must admit the movie showed great drama there.
The real drama, however, is the uncountable host of heavenly angels. One angel appears to make the announcement of the birth of the Christ. But we are told by Luke, suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, “glory to God in the highest and on earth peace to those on whom God’s favor rests.”
And the witnesses are the shepherds. I’m sure you have some sense of who the shepherds were. The movie I referred to earlier does a great job in describing them. They were considered disreputable people who lived on the edge of society, definitely not to be trusted. They were the outcasts, the ones who did awfully menial, difficult work but were never appreciated, never counted. I wonder if any of us would have invited them to our festive gatherings.
They were like many of the invisible people we know who often survive on the margins. They would not be counted and they certainly did not count. So the uncountable host of heavenly angels announce the birth of the Savior to those who do not count.
There is an Irish Augustinian monk named Padraig Daly whose poem I read some time ago and came across again as I was preparing for tonight. This poem is called “Christmas”:
We listen to the story again:
An exotic visitor
Comes to a country girl
In a mountain town
And nine months afterwards
God’s wisdom is a footling child.
Shepherds arrive to the place
Summoned by music;
And scholars from a distant part,
Tracking a star,
But why did not the sun for awe,
Lose its footing in the sky?
Why did seas not charge across astonished land?
Why did every horse in every paddock everywhere
Not break into delirious chase?
By what foul means were linnets stilled?
And how can we,
Loving so little,
(Fettered by knowledge)
Believe in such excessive love?
Believe in such excessive love?
Daly believes it is because we are fettered by knowledge that we cannot believe in such excessive love. I would venture to say that it might not be knowledge that fetters us but rather indifference or selfishness or greed. As we look around our world today, it is obvious that something is preventing us from acting as if we believe in such excessive love.
This excessive love, the birth of Jesus, brings us back to the simplicity of the Gospel, or as John Dear says: “This Creator of the 15 billion-year-old universe wants to be like us, and so is born a child of exhausted immigrants, unprotected and unwanted, but having to obey the law called for by their cruel oppressor, on the outskirts of a brutal empire, come into the world sheltered only by a cave. Here is our savior, the one who shows us the way as servant of peace, bearer of compassion, or as he is later proclaimed: the way, the truth and the life… the Creator of the Universe—one of us!”
How do we participate in such excessive love? Today the bitter experience of displacement—living on the edge, not being counted, not even being seen—is shared by millions throughout the globe. They are in flight from persecution or abuse of their human dignity and rights. They are in fear for their lives. They are not unlike the shepherds, living on the edge.
Here in our own country, fear of “the other” seems to have hardened into an attitude that regards any group that is not able to meet “our standards” as a threat, a potential burden, an enemy to be arrested and locked up. Such an attitude breeds indifference to both their suffering and their rights and condones policies of self-interested exclusion, shortsightedly claimed to be “in the national interest.” We are told, “they didn’t come here legally,” as if that justifies our treating them with such disrespect and disregard or total indifference.
So it would seem for us then that if we wish to hear the voices of the heavenly hosts of angels now, we need to be with the shepherds of our day: those on the edge, those who are afraid, those who are in hiding, those who are homeless, the unemployed, those trafficked, the street people. That I believe is how we begin to understand and live this excessive love.
What we attempt to celebrate tonight then—is it not our limited understanding of this excessive love?
The birth of Jesus brings us back to the simplicity of the Gospel: God’s love becomes incarnate in Jesus, Jesus becomes one of us, but that excessive love which we find so difficult to believe continues to be incarnate again and again, every time someone touches our lives with love. We can only celebrate Christmas fully when we become incarnations of God’s love—to our sisters and brothers, to our friends and family, the poor and needy, to those looking for refuge in our county or state or country.
We not only celebrate then God’s love becoming incarnate in Jesus; but the continuation of that mystery of incarnation is that God’s love becomes incarnate in people who touch our lives with love. This is a tremendous consolation but an ongoing challenge.
During our Advent Peace Prayer we asked:
God increase our longing for the coming of the Savior
Open our eyes to see those made invisible in the world.
Open our ears to hear the cries of our sisters and brothers who thirst for justice.
Open our minds to understand the human dignity of all peoples, culture, races and religions.
Open our hearts to feel the daily pain of those enslaved by human greed,
Open our hands to those in pain and in need.
That’s all Jesus asks of us: “Love one another as I have loved you.” Let us pray for the courage to believe in and try to emulate such excessive love.
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…with inspiration from the reflections of many