Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
The chapter hall decorated for Christmas
On Christmas Eve each year, we gather in the chapter hall for the Solemn Chapter of the Nativity of the Lord. The proclamation of the Birth of Christ is chanted, after which all make the venia. Then, the prioress asks the sister who is to give the homily to please come forward. This year, it was Sister Victoria! She did a beautiful job, and you can read the text of her homily below.
Sister Victoria’s Homily:
I was blessed to be able to go on pilgrimage to the Holy Land in February, before I entered the monastery. Bethlehem was on the itinerary. I was glad to go there, of course, but I wasn’t especially excited for it. I didn’t expect all that much from Bethlehem, not compared with Jerusalem or the Sea of Galilee.
I mean, I had heard as many homilies as your average Catholic about the poverty of Christmas. I was familiar with G.K. Chesterton’s “Everlasting Man,” where he explains why only the humble can understand Christmas. I had read Fulton Sheen’s shameless stealing of Chesterton’s major points about Christmas, to the effect that it takes someone little to see something big: and nothing is bigger, yet more hidden to the proud and the supposedly self-sufficient, than the Divinity of the Christ child. I had the textbook theology regarding Christmas. What more could there be to it?
But then, on February 17, we visited Bethlehem. It’s on the West Bank, under Palestinian control, so we had to go through security checkpoints….. We’re lucky tensions weren’t high, or we wouldn’t have been able to go at all. At around 4:00, we celebrated Mass in a cave in the Shepherds’ field outside the city. Mass in that small, cramped cave of black stone changed my life. I realized that the actual cave in which Jesus was born could not have looked much different…. It would only have been three, maybe five miles away. And….I looked up… It was cold, but we had heat lamps in the low ceiling. The Christ child would not have had heat lamps.
And that was when the Holy Spirit bowled me over.
Because Christ could have become incarnate as an adult, with all His human faculties developed. And the infinite emptying of Himself involved in taking up a human nature is, in itself, so utterly incomprehensible, that there would not have been a difference in its quality had He done that. Who among us could grudge Him bypassing the helplessness of infancy, could blame the Word of God for choosing not to mute himself as a newborn? But that’s not what He did.
He could have been born in a palace, with all the luxuries available in the first century: soft clothing, a comfortable bed. Had Jesus Christ not a right to that? He could have claimed just the meager comforts available in the poor home of Mary in Nazareth with friends and extended family to welcome Him. But that’s not what He chose.
God Almighty, Creator and King of the Universe, chose to enter the world in a rough-hewn, cold, dark cave, a hundred miles from His mother’s earthly home and an infinite distance, you might say, from His Father’s. In light of that, how dare I be so proud? Assert, in my nothingness, so many nonexistent claims to things I thought I had a right to?
The poverty and humility of Bethlehem are truly the poverty and humility of the Cross. As Fulton Sheen says, “It was not so much that His birth cast a shadow on His life, and thus led to His death; it was rather that the Cross was there from the beginning, and it cast its shadow backward to His birth.”
It was the connection between Bethlehem and Calvary that hit me like a ton of bricks in that cave. Indeed, the sole comfort He gave Himself at His birth is the same one he granted Himself at His death: the presence of His mother. Some babies, even at the youngest of ages, have wonderfully expressive faces. I know I was shocked, when my niece Ellie was born, at how expressive her face was months before she could speak a word. I imagine the face of the Infant Jesus was like that, that you could see in it vibrantly the love He felt for Mary as He looked up into her face, and recognized in her humility, her purity of heart, her love and devotion, a reflection of the Father Whom He had loved so perfectly from all eternity.
Yes, the humility and poverty of Christmas became real to me sitting in that cave as Father Bob proclaimed the Gospel: the appearance of the angels to the shepherds.
“And 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 among men with whom he is pleased!’”
I knew then that I had never understood Christmas. That Christmas would be an entirely new thing from that point out. I still fail to grasp what Christmas truly means for me and all mankind, but one thing that I have come to understand better since beginning formation with the Order of Preachers is that, like the angels, I too am called become a messenger of peace to our world gripped by so much despair, so much meaninglessness. Christ came on a mission from His Father to save us, and He gives us the dignity of sharing in His work of salvation by giving us a mission too: to preach His gospel and to serve Him in love. St. John Henry Newman says:
“God knows me and calls me by my name…. He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have my mission—I never may know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next. Somehow I am necessary for His purposes…. I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons. He has not created me for naught. I shall do good, I shall do His work; I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth in my own place, while not intending it, if I do but keep His commandments and serve Him in my calling. Therefore I will trust Him. Whatever, wherever I am, I can never be thrown away.”
That is the message of Christmas, the joy of Christmas: We are sinners, but God has no desire to throw us away on that account; He has come to save us. And the way, I think, to celebrate Christmas is to commit ourselves anew to becoming an angel of peace, preaching that message through our fidelity to our daily tasks, the common life, the life of prayer. Yes, the way to honor Christmas is to pray for the grace to live Christ’s virtue, poverty, peace, and joy, so that He may look at us as He gazed up at Mary in His infancy. As Newman, once again, says: “May each Christmas as it comes find us more and more like Him who at this time became a little child for our sake—more single-minded, more humble, more holy, more affectionate, more resigned, more happy, more full of God.”
