(The Nationalist, 23 December 2005)
A baby is an amazing symbol of both power and powerlessness, or, perhaps more accurately, of power within powerlessness.
This is what love does. It gives away its power. It makes itself vulnerable. This runs against the grain of our competitive and controlling nature. When loving couples have a baby, their lives become as precarious as that of the baby they love. The beauty they have created shatters their former security. Their lives are irrevocably transformed.
That is what love is like. It surrenders. It has no masks, no expectations, no certainties. The Bethlehem baby’s defenceless presence, his shocking and precarious weakness, his overturning of all our ideas about the nature of God, stun us into silence. It is in this sacred silence that the hard thoughts within us can soften, that the unforgiving walls of judgment and blame can crumble, that the cold shadows of our pride can be melted by the warmth of an infant’s smile.
The shadow of Good Friday falls across the heart of the Christmas baby, because love and pain are conjoined twins. If you dare to love, be prepared to grieve.
God’s glory and beauty are revealed in poor, humble, hurting and self-effacing lives of faith and compassion. It can be fully present in failure, disgrace and ignominy. The mystery of God is disguised and veiled in the most hopeless places and people, in the margins of life, in the helplessness of a baby.
Babies transform us by not threatening us. They bless us with the inner freedom to be ourselves – just as they always are. A baby is an invitation that draws out the best in us. We do not resist a baby’s love; in fact we sense we need it. Small wonder that God’s redemptive self-emptying resulted in the wonder of a baby.
The child does not quit on life. It has an indelible curiosity about tomorrow, a passion for the possible. It does not need to hope or believe; it delights in the joy of simply being there.
‘Christmas is the celebration of the truth that God is always accessible within whatever is happening to us, not outside of it; if God cannot hold us in our sin and shame, then God is dead; if God is not touching us in our weakness, then Christmas is a cruel joke’.
(From Daniel O’Leary, “The face of a baby”, The Tablet, 18/25 December 2004, p.18)
For those in a hurry: ‘God became man that man might become God’. (Saint Athanasius)