Pope Francis wants a Church that is bruised, hurting and dirty. His message is provocative but it makes Christmas real
IN OUR Christmas crib one of the sheep has a missing leg. I expect the accidental amputation occurred some time last January as the plaster figures were being stored away for their extended hibernation. When St Francis first introduced the crib back in the 13th century, he didn’t have these problems.
He used live animals – not to be recommended, of course, in our pristine chapels!
A biographer tells us that on Christmas night in the year 1223, Francis was so moved by the humility of the incarnation that he asked a friend to represent it in flesh and blood.
‘I want to really see and feel the hardship that the infant Jesus endured for me,’ he said.
Francis had the right idea. Somehow, the warmth and cleanliness of our Christmas crib is a cosy contrast to the smelly stable on that bitter Bethlehem night.
I wonder sometimes have we killed Christmas with kindness? Have we diluted the profound mystery of the incarnation by tinsel-wrapping it in sentimental stories of a silent, fairytale night when all was calm and bright?
We can easily forget the reality and the mystery of what happened on the first Christmas night.
To think that God, the Eternal Word, became a human being like us! He humbled himself and became small as a little child lying in a manger.
The Angelus prayer sums it up: ‘The Word was made flesh and dwelt amongst us.’
Since his election last March, Pope Francis has been challenging us to bring faith to life. There’s no point in being a believer if it doesn’t make a real difference in your life.
The incarnation is a real event. Christ not only came on earth 2,000 years ago but he comes to us every day, particularly in the lives of the suffering, the poor, the excluded, the isolated and the hungry.
Many of our sisters and brothers yearn to experience the compassion of Christ. Some cry out to us from far away places. Others linger hopefully on the streets of our own towns or quietly fret at home about how they will manage over Christmas.
Somewhere today in subSaharan Africa a young mother cradles her baby, swaddled in tattered clothes. A helpless father watches this grim nativity scene and a few bony animals stand unsteadily nearby.
THIS weekend on the island of Leyte in the Philippines many parents, like Mary and Joseph, are still searching for makeshift shelters in which to spend the night. It is indeed a bleak midwinter for the hundreds of thousands of refugees camped out in freezing temperatures along the borders of Syria.
Mothers, as in biblical times, are heard ‘sobbing and loudly lamenting’ children who have already died, like Rachel, ‘refusing to be comforted because they are no more’.
Much nearer home, too, many Irish people, struggling with bills and overdue debts, are hoping for Christmas visitors bearing gifts from St Vincent de Paul to help tide them over the so-called ‘festive season’.
Are there any cribs more fitting than these stark spectres of Christmas Present?
The challenge to believers in the Christ-child is to make his incarnation a real event in the unfortunate lives of so many in this unequal world. After all, as the 17th century German mystic Angelus Silesius said: ‘Were Christ to be born in a thousand stables it would be to no avail were he not born in our hearts.’
Since becoming coadjutor archbishop of Armagh in April, I have been reflecting on how we might rekindle the faith in this country.
On my ordination day in St Patrick’s Cathedral I remarked that we live in a time of change, challenge and opportunity and we need to find fresh ways of presenting the message of Christ in all its richness.
My episcopal motto – ‘Sing a new song to the Lord’ – suggests renewal and new life but how can we sing the song of the Lord in these strange times? How can we make it heard above the cacophony of voices competing for attention in the public square?
The best way is to show others that believing in Christ makes a real difference in our lives.
St Augustine said: ‘The one who has learned to love a new life has learned to sing a new song.’
That new song is a song about justice and love and peace, a song about forgiveness and reconciliation.
It sings out Good News about the sacredness of all human life. It tells of the dignity of every person and care for God’s creation.
It’s a song about family and solidarity, about fairness and charity, especially for the poor and the vulnerable.
At times, I find the message of Pope Francis quite provoking – disturbing even.
He shakes my complacency. He is not content with a Church that is ‘narcissistic’, closed in on itself, or ‘shut up within structures which give us a false sense of security’.
HE PREFERS a Church that is ‘bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a Church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security’. He says: ‘If something should rightly disturb us and trouble our consciences, it is the fact that so many of our brothers and sisters are living without the strength, light and consolation born of friendship with Jesus Christ, without a community of faith to support them, without meaning and a goal in life.’
Phew! This Holy Father is challenging us to make our faith truly ‘incarnational’.
We must increasingly become bearers of the living word that is made flesh, dwelling among us.
This, I am convinced, is our ‘new song’, the key to our personal conversion and the source of renewal for the Church.
Pope Francis never tires of repeating the words of his predecessor Pope Benedict XVI that take us to the very heart of the Gospel: ‘Being a Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.’
And this is precisely what St Francis was getting at when he introduced the first ‘live’ Christmas crib, way back in the 13th century.