Masses Today

11.00: Brigid Arnold.

CHRISTMAS IS FOR REAL......

At Christmas we celebrate the fact that God takes on human flesh, a human body, becomes physical. At Christmas "the word was made flesh."

That's significant for many reasons. Among other things, the fact that God is born into our material world and takes on a human body, blesses and sanctifies the physical world and our own bodies. It also assures us that we can find meaning and salvation without having to denigrate either our own bodies or the physical world within which we live.

This is clear in the Christmas message and is taught explicitly in the way in which Jesus is born. His birth was real, physical, earthy, and, like all human births, messy.

But we don't often allow ourselves to think like that. Mostly we idealise and spiritualise the birth of Jesus so as to imagine it as privileged, somehow miraculous, and thus removed from the mess, blood, smells, and brute physicality of normal human birth. But, as Scripture assures us, Jesus was fully human in every way and that means too that he was born through the pain, mess, and earthiness of normal childbirth, complete with all that attends that - blood, messy afterbirth, and the need for washing.

Moreover, Scripture tells us that Jesus was not born in a cathedral with the sweet smell of incense perfuming the air, stained-glass windows providing a special light, or soft organ music suggesting that we are in the presence of the sacred. Indeed, he wasn't even born in a hospital, where modem medicine and sanitation help cover the mess and the smells of childbirth. The gospels tell us instead that he was born in a barn and then laid in a feeding trough.

Jesus's birth is placed inside a stable because, among other things, barns don't look like cathedrals and animals don't smell like incense. There's a brute earthiness to a barn, smells you don't get in church. As for the manger, the feeding trough, well, that makes sense too, given that Jesus will tell us that his 'flesh is food for the life of the world'. If one of the main purposes of Jesus's life is to end up as food, the Eucharist, on a table (we call, it an altar), shouldn't he be born in a feeding trough? The wood of the manger and the wood of the altar are one and the same, both feeding tables.

But it's difficult for us to accept how truly physical, earthy, and messy all of this really is. Everyone struggles with this, conservatives and liberals alike: conservatives are forever wanting to make Jesus's actual physical birth a miraculous event, with Mary delivering Jesus in some privileged way so that there isn't at his birth the normal groaning, blood, and mess of childbirth. Liberals don't fare much better. They're forever trying to turn the physical event of Jesus's birth into a mere symbol (which, like the conservatives'miracle, doesn't have any real blood).

The same is true for most world religions. Invariably salvation is seen as an escape from the flesh, an escape from the physical, an escape from dirt, an escape from mess, all done in the name of the spiritual. The way to God, in most religious traditions and in most ordinary imaginations, involves escaping the physical and frowning upon mess.

But, that's not the way of Christianity, as the birth of Jesus makes plain. In the incarnation - Christmas - God enters the world, becomes physical, and, by doing that, assures us that the spiritual does not set itself against the physical, that the sacred is not antithetical to the smells of the human body, and that God is not just found in churches and in places that are clean and reverent. The God born at Christmas is also found in the earthiness of our lives, where both body and soul must often struggle with mess.

What Christmas teaches us is that God is as much domestic as monastic, a God of the body as well as of the soul, a God who is found in barns as well as in churches, in kitchens as well as in cathedrals, Among the many things we celebrate at Christmas therefore. is the sacredness of our own lives, in all their physicality. What's made holy by Jesus's birth? Almost everything that is physical: nature, our homes, our kitchens, our workplaces, our barns, our sports facilities, and, not least, our own bodies.

Spirit too, of course, is blessed and made holy by the incarnation, but the Word was already spiritual. At Christmas, it "was made flesh."

-Fr. Ronald Rolheiser.

Christmas Left-overs!

FULL CHRISTMAS PROGRAMME

Sunday, 26th: 11.00 & 6.30
Monday, 27th December to Monday, January 3rd: 11.00am (One Mass daily)
SUNDAY, 2nd January: Usual Sunday Programme
 
PRIORY OFFICE
The Priory Office will close at 3.00pm on Christmas Eve.
Normal life will resume again on Tuesday, January 4th.

Is There a Santa Claus?

On December 21, 1897, there appeared an editorial in The New York Sun which has since become a classic. It was headed "Is There a Santa Claus?" and was written by Francis Church (1839-1906). The origin of the Santa Claus article is best described by The Sun's editor, Edward P. Mitchell. Mr. Mitchell says in his Memoirs of an Editor:

" Frank Church was a regular contributor to The Sun. His lifetime lasted for four years beyond the date when I became editor-in-chief and for that period he was my alternate.

One day in 1897 I handed to him a letter that had come in the mail from a child of eight, saying: 'Please tell me the truth, is there a Santa Claus?' Her little friends had told her 'No.' Church bristled and pooh-poohed at the subject when I suggested that he write a reply to Virginia O'Hanlon; but he took the letter and turned with an air of resignation to his desk. In a short time he had produced the article which has probably been reprinted more often than any other newspaper article. Even yet no holiday season approaches without bringing to the newspaper requests from all over the land for the exact text for repeated use on Christmas Day."

Here is the complete and original copy:

Is There a Santa Claus?

We take pleasure in answering at once and thus prominently the communication below, expressing at the same time our great gratification that its faithful author is numbered among the friends of The Sun:

Dear Editor-I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says 'If you see it in The Sun it's so.' Please tell me the truth, is there a Santa Claus?

Virginia O'Hanlon.
115 West Ninety-fifth Street.
Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men's or children's, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus! It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

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