“God has sent down to earth a bag bulging with his mercy, a small bag, perhaps, but a full one: for it was a small child that was given to us, but in him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead.” (St Bernard of Clairvaux)
A bag bulging with Mercy. What a wonderful description and, though I’ve been reading this piece every Christmas for forty six years, this is the first time it seems to have resonated with me. Like I’m seeing it for the first time.
We didn’t have a snow-white Christmas but today we have the next best thing, with a heavy frost covering the earth about us, white cars, white rooftops. We’re still in the season. Beautiful weather we have had these past few days, and it is set to continue for the best part of a week.
There’s an olive wood crib from Bethlehem itself in front of the altar here in Mervue church, a lovely physical connection for us to have with the place where Jesus was born. Physical connections are an important part of the Christian story, a religion which is not purely spiritual since the birth of Jesus in flesh and bone and blood means that God wanted to connect with us in a physical way. We are tactile believers. Ours is an incarnational faith. In Holy Communion too we have this abiding physical connection with God.
John the Beloved understood it well. Jesus, the Word who is life; Jesus Christ who is with God and is God, Word made flesh, living among us. John speaks of the Glory of Jesus that they have seen, Jesus whom they have touched with their hands. So close, so intimate, so friendly and tender. This is the beloved who rested close to the breast of Jesus at the Last Supper, hearing what others would not.
Our physical connection with each other is also an essential part of our religious experience. Not only do we touch each other but we discover God in the touch of our embracing, the shake of our hands and our kissing.
It happened for me when I went to visit a friend and neighbour in the hospice on Christmas Eve. He took my hands in his own, kissed them in the way people used to reverently kiss the hands of priests in the past. And I kissed his hands with the same reverence and our four hands were entwined in each other. We shed tears, he pulled me down to himself and there we prayed, our two lives folded into each other like a sacred Tent of Meeting. A holy place where God is encountered. This was a real Crib for me, it was there that I came face to face with the Word made flesh. In him I touched Christ and was touched by Him. Sadness intermingled with the joy of love, the love being greater than the sadness.
Celebrating Christmas Day Mass in my home parish church was a real treat, being among my own people, even if many of them no longer know me. But I am of Mervue, here I grew up, here my faith was shaped and my social conscience developed. I am at home here even among strangers. Lovely too that some of my own family were there at Mass, my teenage nieces smiling brightly as they approached me for Holy Communion.
Chatting with neighbours old and new after Mass, the sun shining brightly. For food I went on tour to each of my siblings, having dinner with one, dessert with another and tea with the other. The food was fabulous and it was nice to be invited to say grace, being joined by my five-year-old grand-nephew. Giving him water to drink, buttering his bread, being instructed by him to spread the jam over ever bit of it, right out to the edges.
Of course there are challenging moments too that Christmas cannot keep at bay. The awful distress of a sick two-year old who has a pain that he cannot name and the only way to express it is to cry and cry and cry, clinging tenaciously to his mother who herself suffers every moment with her inconsolable child. As does his Dad. And I would love to save them all from it. And I think there must have been moments like that too when Jesus was a baby.
There is too the awful upset of a boy when his favourite toy breaks in two in the evening and there’s no way to repair it. He doesn’t make a scene. Just goes to sit on the stairs with his sadness. I go to him and tell him of the red car that I loved more than any other toy I had as a boy. How it broke, how desperately sad I was and how my Mother told me to put it on the windowsill at night so that Santy might come and take it away to fix it. It was gone when I got up in the morning and, lo and behold, next Christmas, all fixed as good as new. At this the boy smiled and said of his broken toy, “I’ll put it in an envelope!” And that was that. He returned to play with other toys.
In all of these and in the grief of recent death, I am touched by Jesus and it brings me back to these words of St. John the Beloved, words that uplift and bring tears at the same time:
The Incarnation of the Word of Life – 1 John 1:1-4
Something which has existed from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us. We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. We write this to make our joy complete.”
