AS I WAS SAYING...
I suspect that, in many cases, the last thing we want to hear about the first Sunday morning after Christmas is the sheer bliss of family life. Having spent the last few days closeted with our own family, we have a very good idea of how far removed it is from the Nazarene ideal that is so often placed before us. You will all be familiar with the family photograph album.You may even have pored over it during recent days. You will be familiar with the formal family photograph, a picture taken not to mark any particular occasion, but merely to record that this particular family looked like this at this particular time. Everything is very staid, formal and correct. The hair is combed and the clothes are spotless. Everyone is standing still in their correct, allotted positions. When you look at this image, this photograph and try to match it with the reality, you will say to yourself: How very different image and reality are. You know the hours of preparation that went into the staging of that image. That formal frozen frame could never capture the energy and the turmoil that gave that lot their identity and their life. In fact you know that the formal photograph is a complete set-up, an artificial masking of reality.
But our image of the Holy Family can be distorted in this same manner. Medieval artists set out to do for the Holy Family what today's photographers do for our families. Now as long as we know the conventions in operation it doesn't matter. Our critical faculties will supply the necessary correctives. But, unfortunately, we have been trained to suspend our critical faculties when dealing with our received images of the Holy Family. Consequently that energetic and interesting family has been reduced to a bloodless cliche. Mary and Joseph have been portrayed as fawning parents living in awe of their wonder-working son. We are left with the impression that it was Jesus who formed the personalities of Joseph and Mary rather than the other way around. Here the child was truly regarded as father of the man! Both the Holy Family and ourselves are damaged by this approach: Firstly, it underestimates the very active role that Mary and Joseph played in the formation of the character of Jesus; secondly, through elevating it out of reality altogether, it destroys the Holy Family as a role model for our own families.
Our families are the places where we are all allowed make our mistakes in security. The family is the anvil upon which our personalities are formed. If there is no hammerblows, we will all turn out to be undifferentiated, uninteresting lumps. Where there is no tension, there will be no growth. It is reassuring to learn from the gospels that the family at Nazareth was no different.
Indeed from today's extract we see that the Holy Family confronted the harsh reality of life and death in the very early days of the infants life. This is no snap shot for a picture postcard. This is the stuff of survival. St. Luke's gospel is more explicit still on the inner tensions of the Nazarene family. He gets lost for three days and has his parents sick with worry. When they eventually find him he has a smart answer for his mother: "Did you not know I must be about my father's business." We see there at work the tensions and strains so familiar to the rest of us. Every twelve-year-old that ever existed has an answer for his mother. There is a religious and social impression abroad of the family as a happy, tension-free religious and social unit. This image is often portrayed in TV game shows of the American variety. If we fall for this sort of stuff, we will soon be forced to the conclusion that there is something wrong with our own crowd. There is not, of course. Continue to enjoy them, and the season that's in it!
-Dick Lyng.
The same yesterday, today and forever!
Christmas can appear to be unchanging to many of us: we do the same thing, meet the same people, give and receive the same presents, year in, year out. But this is not true for everyone. Below you will find an account of the very different ways in which diverse characters have spent their Christmas.
I like in particular Father Des Faul's account of one of the many Christmases he spent as chaplain to the Maze prison. Since the Good Friday Agreement Des has not been in the news so much. But, when he was in his prime, he came across as a serious, dour cleric. I hope the little story will go some way towards redeeming him as a man with a lovely sense of humour. God knows, he needed it, given the fact that he served in the Maze as chaplain for over twenty-five years. While not quite so dramatic, the other stories give us windows into very different Christmases and very different lifestyles. I hope you enjoy them.
Sr Irish Mary (Carmelite Nun)
The joy of Christmas begins early on the Eve. We are all awakened by the ringing of a well-loved carol, as the Prioress, carrying a statue of Our Lady, accompanied by candle-bearers, incense and singers, visits each cell on the way to choir, where the statue will be placed on the altar of the choir. We are honouring Our Lady's unheralded journey to Bethlehem. Afterwards, at morning prayer, the antiphons will ring out again and again: "Tomorrow is the day when the sins of the world will be wiped away."
Father Denis Faul served as chaplain in the Maze Prison for 25 years.
My first Christmas Mass at the Maze in 1971 took place on an old airfield full of Nissen huts, surrounded by wire. On that Christmas Eve as I wandered around the barbed-wire compounds with half a dozen other priests, we all said spontaneously: "What does this place remind us of? " Answer "St Patrick's College, Maynooth" where we were in incarcerated for seven years.
A few years after that, the internees had prepared a super Poteen from rotten fruit, vegetables, boot polish, cleaning fluids, chocolates and sweets From the First Sunday of Advent the smell of the illicit spirit grew worse, until it out-smelled the knacker's yard for dead cows just outside the prison wire. On Christmas night after Midnight Mass an internee who was a strong footballer was so stimulated by Long Kesh brew that he burst through the locked doors of a Nissen hut to appear at 3 a. m. like the Archangel Gabriel in the full glare of the arc lights. Luckily, the soldiers of Herod in their watchtowers were equally drunk and forgot to shoot him.
In the H-Blocks in the Seventies, I remember seeing a beautiful Christmas tree. With the innocence of childhood I was attracted to feel the baubles and balloons. Suddenly I heard the Protestant wardens giggling. For the first and last time in my life I was seeing and handling condoms masquerading as Christmas balloon's. "Humanae Vitae", I shouted, and fled for protection to the cells where the chaste Catholics were reading the Republican News.
Paul Farmer, a Samaritan worker
This Christmas Eve, I won't be with my family. I won't be at church, nor will I be in the pub. I'll be doing a shift for the Samaritans. For many people in crisis Christmas is not a season of tidings of comfort and joy, but an intolerable burden. We are busiest between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. when our volunteers may be enabling someone to articulate feelings in a way they have never done before - what T S Eliot described as "the luxury of an intimate disclosure to a stranger". You do not often hear from a caller again but sometimes a branch will receive a Christmas card from someone saying "Thank you"
Mary (Salvation Army)
I shall be spending Christmas Eve on one of Bournemouth's less picturesque Streets. Street dwellers may be dirty, cold and hungry. But they are people with feelings like anyone else. While a hot meal benefits them, a friendly face is equally important So when I am dispensing soup, sandwiches and hot drinks - sometimes the only warm food they will have during Christmas - I try not to judge. For the sake of the street-people, my fellow volunteers and 1 simply cannot stop caring at Christmas, instead we continue to care because of it.
The House of Christmas
There fared a mother driven forth
Out of an inn to roam;
In the place where she was homeless
All men are at home.
The crazy stable close at hand,
With shaking timber and shifting sand,
Grew a stronger thing to abide and stand
Than the square stones of Rome.
To an open house in the evening
Home shall men come,
To an older place than Eden
And a taller town than Rome.
To the end of the way of the wandering star,
To the things that cannot be and that are,
To the place where God was homeless
and all men are at home.
G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
St. Augustine's Blessing
May the Lord Jesus give you a heart to love him,
a will to choose him,
an understanding to conceive him,
a reason by which may always adhere to him,
and may the God of Love love you eternally.
Amen.
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