Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
In the name of the one God, who is Lover, Beloved, and Love Overflowing. Amen.
Three years ago, on Christmas Eve, my grandmother died. I remember so clearly the upward tilt of her face as if she were lying in anticipation. Her mouth gaped open, and her breath was ragged. Her entire being in that moment was need, wanting, and expectation. I held her soft hand in mine. I matched my breathing to hers, and I tried to make my whole being a kind of waiting, like hers was in that moment. I yearned and labored, with her, as much as I could, for the release that was not only death—though it was certainly that—but that was also birth. In those last moments of her life, she was both the Holy Mother whose name she shared, groaning in labor pains; and also the promised child, coming into the world.
That moment of waiting, yearning, and laboring with my grandmother is forever fused for me with the coming of the Messiah at Christmas. And that moment, poignant and sad and even joyful in its way, adds color, depth, and meaning to this most holy festival. Because this is the truth our faith and my life have taught me: that in the midst of life we are in death, and that in the midst of death, we are in life.
In the midst of the deepest darkness, when hope seems furthest, and the night as long as it could be, when despair beckons and sorrow threatens, that is the moment God comes to us, comes to us as a little human child, powerless, defenseless, threatened, and exiled. And also lovely, trusting, and tender, and beautiful. Comes to us, in weakness and love and vulnerability to save and deliver us from the world we have created.
Leonard Cohen writes,
“I greet you from the other side of sorrow and despair with a love so vast and shattered it will reach you everywhere.”I greet you from the other side of sorrow and despair with a love so vast and shattered it will reach you everywhere.
Why should our salvation look like a refugee baby, born far from home, defenseless and crowded in among the animals, surrounded, not by beautiful greenery and poinsettias, like our lovely crèche, but by the stink and mess of a stable?
God comes to us in this guise of vulnerability and need to show us how to be free. To show us that to be filled with the whole presence of God, as Jesus was, is to be perfectly, fully human, which is also to say perfectly, fully in need of tenderness, care, and love and perfectly, fully built for trust and mutuality and union. Like a little child.
Thomas Merton writes of the true self that
“At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes our lives […]. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. […] It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely. […] I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere.” {1}It is this nothingness, this absolute poverty that the Christ child models for us at Christmas. God, it would seem, is not particularly interested in great acts of power, in the destruction of empires and the humiliation of those people with whom we disagree. Nor, it would seem, is God interested in our becoming those invulnerable, perfectly put together people we think we would be if only we got rid of our pain, our shame, and those parts of us we find least acceptable.
Perhaps what we see as darkness, is really, in God’s sight, the other side of light. Perhaps sorrow and joy are most truly themselves when joined together. As if the pairing of these seeming opposites reveals their deeper unity, reveals that love must be shattered to be known everywhere, reveals that our poverty is God’s glory, reveals that God must be human for humanity to be freed from its enslavement to power and greed.
For, if we could become again like that little child Jesus, crying for his mother’s milk, if we could become all need once more, like my grandmother on her deathbed, stripped of all politeness, then we could cry out to God for the mercy that is ever flowing around us, that embraces and sustains us in every moment of every day. Then our poverty and our indigence would no longer seem to us shameful or ugly, but rather the very source of our total dependence on God. And in the revelation of our true faces in the pure light of our poverty, God’s mercy would shine in and through us like a blazing sun to light and warm this hurting world.
God greets us, moment by moment, from the other side of sorrow and despair with a love so vast and shattered it can reach us everywhere. We have only to cry out in our need, to grab hold of the Divine Mother and nurse and be fed. And to revel in the love and glory of a God who would becomes human to show us how to be free.
Amen.
{1} Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander
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